9 On Test $1500 GA: Ming PCs (Part 4) - Dino PC Baronyx, PC Specialist Vanquish Eclipse 670 MKII

Super test: Dino PC Baronyx

Housed within the simple, diminutive Carbide 300R, you’d be forgiven for thinking this Dino PC build doesn’t really look like a $1500 PC. But this is a gaming machine – not something built to sit looking pretty on a stand at some Taiwanese trade show.

To be honest, so long as it’s not obstructive in any way, we’re not very bothered what clothes our gaming PCs arrive in. most of our machines sit beneath our desks, and once the game is loaded all our attention is on the screen. If you can save money on a chassis then you’ve got some more cash to play with and throw at the more important components sitting inside it.

The parts list is looking pretty good once you get past the plain exterior. The now ubiquitous i5-3570K is once more in evidence, and an overclocked GTX 670 is sitting in the main PCIe slot, taking responsibility for making your games look and run beautifully. It also has a small Corsair SSD installed as an OS boot drive to drop up the standard 1TB mechanical hard disk.

Trade-off

Sadly though, that ubiquitous CPU isn’t given the same amount of over clocking lovin’ it is elsewhere in our test, coming in at a relatively conservative 4.4GHz. Like the AdvanceTec and Cyberpower machines, that puts it at the bottom of the pile in terms of CPU performance.

On the flip side though, the decision to opt for an overclocked GTX 670, like that found in the Chillblast machine, means that it yields impressive gaming benchmarks to offset that CPU performance. By using an overclocked GTX 670, it can hit frame rates rivaling the stock clocked GTX 680s that the Vibox and YOYOTech machines are packing. In gaming terms then, this bizarrely named Baronyx is a bit of a powerhouse.

The margins in this crowded marketplace are tight though, and that weaker CPU performance drags the machine down as a whole compared to the competition. We also found it a little odd that despite opting for a small SSD it hasn’t taken advantage of the Intel Smart Response technology to pair up with the HDD.

Hard times

At 60GB, there isn’t a huge amount of space capacity for your games once the OS has been installed. Chances are you’ll fit two titles on there before running low on space. That means your Steam library is relegated to the slower HDD, so you only really feel the benefit of the solid state drive for those 14 seconds of booting. Linking via Smart Response, you’d find your oft-loaded titles benefiting from the SSD caching and boot times wouldn’t suffer – as demonstrated by the AdvanceTec machine.

Again, the Dino PC is by no means a bad rig; it performs brilliantly in terms of pure gaming, which is our pure gaming, which is our raison d’etre. But in terms of all round value and performance, it’s left in the shade by some of the other excellent rigs in this test. Balance is vital at this price point, and with the Baronyx, the scales are just ever so slightly off-kilter.

Super test: PC Specialist Vanquish Eclipse 670 MKII

When you’re talking about a balanced PC build, it’s tough to look past this machine from PC Specialist. It really has got the lot, and it’s difficult to see where and real compromise or sacrifice has been made. Pretty much all the other machines here have dropped something, or opted for cheaper versions in order to push more performance elsewhere, but there’s precious little evidence of that in the Vanquish Eclipse.

Core i5-3570K with a decent overclock? Check. Quality graphics card? Check. Copious amounts of RAM? Check.

Decent capacity solid state drive? Check. See. Everything you could want in a $1500 gaming machine – it’s even all enclosed in the Cooler Master HAF chassis. There was a time not so long ago when pretty much every gaming PC that came through our labs was housed in one of those.

So what’s the problem with this machine then? There must be one, right? Well, no, not really. We’re tempted to say that the 16GB of RAM is a little overkill and the Blu-ray drive is almost a complete waste of cash in home PC that’s not sat under a HDTV, but that would mean complaining about things you seem to be getting as extras. We’d rather have a higher capacity SSD, but we doubt shipping off the extraneous ODD and halving the RAM count would free up enough cash to spend on a 240/256GB solid state drive. It would be churlish to complain, then.

SiSoft says

All that extra memory doesn’t translate into more bandwidth, though. The HyperX RAM in the PC Specialist machine comes fairy close to the bottom of the SiSoft Sandra memory bandwidth test.

That said, the differences are slight, and higher capacity is probably of more worth to us users than an extra fraction of a GB/s. the combination of SSD OS drive and the huge amount if RAM on offer mean that this is a thoroughly responsive machine.

Put the boot in

At 120GB that SSD isn’t huge, but you’ll get a good few of your favourite games on it. That will make as much difference to your overall experience as the lightning-quick boot time – the second fastest in our test.

The CPU is clocked at a good, solid 4.6GHz, which puts it right up there with the best of the i5 brigade. In terms of straight quad-core processing then, the Vanquish Eclipse is on top of its game.

The choice of the GTX 670 as its graphics processor is an excellent one; though it’s only a stock-clocked card it still has some fantastic gaming chops. Once again, it loses out in-game to the speedier HD 7970 and GTX 680, but it can definitely hold its head up high, exceeding 30fps in both DiRT Showdown and Metro 2033 at 1080p top settings.

The Vanquish Eclipse then is one of the brightest rigs we’ve got in this test. It certainly doesn’t sit astride the benchmark tables like some computing goliath, but nor does it have any glaring failings or omissions. It just goes to show what a smart outfit PC Specialist is when comes to specs.