This is great for minimalism, and maintaining a compact size, but is often less than ideal when it comes to accessing the cards. Card slots are a thing of the past with metal wallets and usually suffer from what I call ‘card stacking’, where all the cards are stored by stacking them on top of one another. Metal Wallets suffer from the fact that it’s hard to integrate functional features onto a slab of metal. Whether this is the look and feel of the metal (glossy or matt) through if it combines other materials like leatheror wood, or designs, I’d be lying if I said the main reason most purchase a metal wallet is that it looks ‘ cool’ – because they do. Metal Wallets look and feel different from most other wallets and have a larger array of stylistic choices. The second positive – although opinionated – is their unique look. This is perfect for someone who doesn’t carry much cash and only has a few credit or debit cards with them at any time. The first thing to mention is metal wallets are typically minimalist and smaller in size. Before you consider purchasing a metal wallet understand the reasons why you want one and the negative features one may hold. So long as the drivers play nicely, that is.Metal wallets are not without their pros and cons. UltimoPC's similarly priced P45-based, twin 4870X2 rig though should ultimately blow this machine out of the gaming water, leaving SLI for the NVIDIA fan-boys alone. The Scudo SLI is a decent machine, well specced and well made, but simply can't compete on the GPU front. There is Yoyotech's Warbird, although in the last month the resurgence of the US Dollar has meant the price has leapt up £100, and if you're in need of a pre-installed operating system for it, that's only going to bump the price closer to £1,200. So if there's two thousand pounds in your pocket begging to be spent on a gaming rig, should you throw the lot at this SKU of the Scudo? With the performance of AMD's 4870X2 it's hard to recommend putting your wallet behind NVIDIA's top SLI pairing. Once Intel's brand new combo arrives – with the X58 boards now officially supporting NVIDIA's multi-GPU platform as well as AMDs – then we should see prices on these sorts of rigs plummet. With DDR3 memory likely to make 2009 its dominant year then do you really want to put your money into a brand new rig with last-gen memory? But still, with Nehalem so close, do you really want to bet on a last-gen processor/mobo setup either? The Scudo does hold its own against the Warbird in future-resistance. This OC will boost the performance figures slightly, but still not enough to put daylight between it and the 4870X2 rig. The pre-release version we tested came with a bog-standard 2.66GHz clockspeed on the Intel quad-core CPU, but the final units will all come overclocked out of the box at 3GHz. This makes no real difference to gaming speeds, but loading was seriously improved with the faster HD. To keep the GI-01 SLI below two grand, that's been replaced here with the slower Caviar. One of the many positives of the single-GPU Scudo is the boot drive: the speedy WD Velociraptor. The AMD box is around £700 cheaper than this SLI rig and is offering more-orless equivalent scores. True the Scudo adds 10fps to the Warbird's Crysis score, but in WiC and GRID the twin GPU offering – even with NVIDIA's flagship cards – can only just about keep pace. Playing Crysis at 2,560x1,600 at 34fps, and World in Conflict at over 40fps, really is nothing to be sniffed at.Ī win for NVIDIA though is sunk by the sheer performance of the 4870X2, as shown by Yoyotech's Warbird from PCF219. Taken in comparison with the single-GPU Scudo the extra performance of the added card is impressive, giving at the very least another ten frames per second at the highest resolution we can muster. ![]() The overcooked BFG GTX280s purr away happily under the hood of the Scudo with SLI enabled straight out of the box with no perceivable problems. UltimoPC has opted for the excellent Asus Striker II Extreme board, packing its high-end features, DDR3 support, energy efficiency and serious overclocking potential. So it's all about SLI then? Well, that's still a bone of contention as some companies, such as Beast Computers, are having reliability issues, shying away from building multi-GPU machines with the offending 790i boards. That should give you an idea about how much more reliable AMD's CrossFire drivers are these days. Sadly, after almost a month of building, testing and rebuilding our friends putting together the AMD rig still couldn't rely on it functioning in any reasonable state.
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