9 On Test $1500 GA: Ming PCs (Part 6) - Wired2Fire Diablo GTX, YOYOTech Fi7epower PCF

Super test: Wired2Fire Diablo GTX

The safe money option seems to be a combo of the Intel i5-3570K, clocked up somewhere around 4.6GHz, with a GTX 670 and a 120 GB SSD. This Wired2Fire machine looks to be hitting a similar spec to the excellent PC Specialist rig though with half as much RAM and a much quicker SSD.

To be perfectly honest, dropping the RAM count down won’t make a blind bit of difference to your experience with this rig unless you’re the sort of person who spends a lot of time tweaking massive image files in Photoshop on their home rig. Even then, 8GB is a pretty sizeable chunk of RAM to be playing with. In term of gaming the difference is negligible to the point of being inconsequential.

The SSD though us a different matter. The Mushkin Chronos Enhanced drive seems to be one speedy ol’ solid state drive, especially in terms of the 4K random writes, which are almost twice as quick as the Intel 330’s in the PC Specialist rig. In sequential read/write terms though it’s not quite so quick. Those 4K scores though should give you a good idea of just how responsive your PC would offset any perceivable issues caused by dropping the RAM capacity.

With the smart choice of using the GTX 670 as graphics card the Diablo GTX has got some impressive gaming chops, and will throw polygons around a 1080p panel with aplomb. Compared with the excellent overclocked HD 7970 of the AdvanceTec rig though it’s still looking like a bit of a slouch – but aside from the heavily compute-focused DiRT Showdown you’d be hard pushed to see the extra performance when you’re actually in-game.

Under cover

Wired2Fire doesn’t have a bad standard warranty. The Vibox and YOYOTech offerings of just a single year of parts and labour cover are the weakest, with Scan’s three-year cover being the best. Wired2Fire offers a two-year return-to-base warranty, with cover for both parts and labour for the full term. That’s almost up there with the Chillblast cover.

That gives great peace of mind when you’re choosing your components, and means that your overclocked machine will still be going a couple years down the line. You will have to sort out getting the rig back to the manufacture if something goes wrong, but that’s a small price to pay if it’s something serious.

That might come in handy, because the rig has been set up so that the i5 is running at a constant 4.6GHz rather than throttling up only when needed. The large cooler should stop that becoming a problem, but it still seems odd not to take advantage of the power saving functions of the Intel architecture.

Again though, it’s a very well balanced setup, marrying impressive gaming speed with decent raw processing chops and a general computing setup that will give you a very responsive experience. It’s also a machine that will last you a long time, giving you a decent length of time before you’re going to need to start realistically thinking about which parts you upgrade.

Super test: YOYOTech Fi7epower PCF

Not convinced by the necessity of low capacity solid-state storage? Then YOYOTech‘s latest Fi7epower machine might well be the right rig for you. Like the Vibox Boss XS, it has thrown its full weight behind the performance of the processor and graphics card, rather than the more ephemeral positives of running the machine from an SDD boot drive.

With the Core i7-3770K, arguably the finest processor that Intel has made in recent memory, doing all the raw processing shenanigans at the heart of the budget-oriented Asus motherboard it’s right up there at the top of the CPU performance free. It’s not the quickest due to a slightly speedier overclock from Vibox, but at 4.5GHz compared to the 4.6GHz of the Boss XS, it’s a close run thing, and still makes the Fi7epower a lot quicker than the competing i5-based rigs.

It’s not just the top Intel CPU that’s churning away in the Cooler Master 690 chassis-the graphics card is pretty quick too. YOYOTech has opted for the top of Nvidia’s desktop range of Kepler cards, the GTX 680. Like the Vibox GPU it’s just the stock-clocked version, so there is a little in the way of extra space available if you want to try the overclocking dance yourself.

Cost-cutting

That said, the overclocked GTX 670 that’s responsible for the graphical grunt work for the Chillblast machine gives practically the same benchmark scores across the board, and saving some cash on the GPU would have meant it could have added a small caching SSD to speed up that Western Digital hard drive.

But that hard drive isn’t quite the limiting factor that it was with the Boss XS. It’s a full SATA 6Gbps drive, and that means it boots in half the time of the slower SATA 3Gbps Seagate drive used in the Vibox machine. If YOYOTech could trade the GTX 680 for a GTX 670 and a 60GB SSD, the Smart Response caching tech –conspicuous by its absence from the Dino PC build-would be available to knock that boot time right down again. The AdvanceTec rig shows just how quick a cached HDD can be on boot, ably keeping pace with the speedy SSDs used by the bulk of the other rigs in this group test.

Having that eight-threaded monster of a CPU inside the machine means that it will cope with anything computing related you throw at it. If you split your time between gaming and anything productivity related, you’ll be glad of those extra threads. There is a simple, short upgrade path too. Simply adding in a decent capacity SSD will give you a really top-notch rig, and with prices crashing in the solid-state market it’s cheaper than ever to do so. Replacing a CPU or GPU is going to be a lot pricier.

Its’ the faster HDD and more stylish, if last generation (there are no front-mounted USB 3.0 ports, for example) CM 690 chassis that give the Fi7epower the edge over the similarly specced Vibox machine. They both have a rather paltry one-year return-to-base warranty, though the lack of a solid state drive here isn’t the killer you might think it would be.