Intel's latest Core i7 range of CPUs offers plenty of performance straight out of the box, never mind about overclocking. However, the one thing they do excel at is being tweaked to run faster than standard without resorting to fancy water-cooling or even more exotic cooling methods.

You may not have heard of Wired2Fire before, but the Dorking, Surrey based system builders have been making some well built and quick PCs since 2004. The i7-powered Hellspawn Xtreme carries on that tradition and, although it comes with an eye-watering price tag (over three grand just for the system box), you do get one of the fastest desktop PCs available anywhere at the time of writing.

As with most Wired2Fire systems, the Hellspawn Xtreme is totally customisable through the Wired2Fire website so you can either save money or go totally mad depending on your budget.

Our review Hellspawn Xtreme came with the fastest current i7 processor available, the i7 965, but overclocked from the standard 3.2GHz up to 3.7GHz. It uses the standard Intel air cooler which does a very good job of keeping the CPU cool, but for peace of mind you may want to opt for the Thermaltake Golden Orb cooler (£21.53) that is offered as an alternative.

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The processor sits in an Asus P6T Deluxe motherboard, one of the very few i7 motherboards around presently using Intel's new X58 chipset. One of the reasons why the new architecture is so quick is that the chipset supports tri-band memory and three of the motherboard's six DIMM slots are filled by Corsair XMS3 1,333MHz DDR3 memory modules, for a total of 6GB of system memory. That should be enough to keep the installed Windows Vista Home Premium OS happy.

All of which, as you can imagine, makes the performance of the Hellspawn Xtreme pretty special, and needless to say it goes straight to the top of our performance charts like a bullet, with PCMark05 and PCMark Vantage scores of 14,700 and 9,370 respectively.

The graphics performance doesn't flag either. Powered by a pair of 2GB ATI HD Radeon HD4870 X2 cards set up in a CrossFire configuration, it gives a score of 24,800 marks in 3DMark06 at a 1,280 x 1,024 resolution and a score of 13,100 in the Extreme test (1,920 x 1,200) in the new 3DMark Vantage.

That's all well and good, but what about in the real gaming world? Well, using the latest Warhammer version of that killer of systems, Crysis, we got a score of 40fps at a resolution of 1,920 x 1,200 with the in-game settings set to the maximum Enthusiast level, while adding 4x FSAA to the mix resulted in the frame rate dropping to 30fps.

To add to the gaming effect, Wired2Fire uses an Asus Xonar HDAV 1.3 Deluxe 7.1 sound card which supports 24-bit recording and playback up to 192kHz, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Digital Plus and DTS. It's compatible with HDMI 1.3a and can send 24-bit, 192kHz audio through its two HDMI ports.

For storage there's a multitude of options available but our review sample went with the quickest in the form of two Western Digital 300GB VelociRaptor drives built into a RAID 0 array. For those who don't know, the VelociRaptor drive is the fastest non-SSD drive on the planet with a spin speed of 10,000rpm and a 32MB cache. You also get two optical drives; a standard 16x DVD drive and a LG Blu-Ray / HD-DVD combo drive.

Despite the number of fans in the system, it's a remarkably quiet machine and it's backed by a year's Collect & Return warranty.

Yes its expensive... well, OK, very expensive. But if you want an off the shelf system that plays the current crop of high-end games with ease and has some future-proofing built in, it really is worth a look.