Overclockers Titan Prodigy Arctic review

PC Pro’s labs are no stranger to hulking desktop PC towers, but with numerous empty slots, bays and sockets that may never be used, it’s becoming clear that these monoliths are overkill for the average PC user. Overclockers has set out to prove this with its Titan Prodigy, which crams big-case components into an endearingly compact chassis.

The case in question, BitFenix’s Prodigy, stands 404mm off the desk and is 359mm wide – significantly smaller than the average tower. It’s better looking than many full-size PCs, too: the white façade and handles contrast strongly against the black borders, and the soft plastic used for much of the front of the machine feels good, even if it does have the tendency to get a little grubby.

The metal side panels are extremely sturdy, the plastic used for the front of the machine is strong, and the handles on the front and rear of the system have a little give in them – but that, according to BitFenix, is down to design. The metal used inside feels strong, and the only low point is the ill-fitting side panel that rattles when moved.

Removing the side panel makes it immediately obvious just how much hardware Overclockers has crammed into its system. One side is dominated by a graphics card that stretches almost the entire length of the chassis; the mini-ITX motherboard is screwed onto a platform halfway up the rear of the enclosure that sits on top of the full-size PSU; and an Overclockers-branded watercooling loop, with two Xigmatek fans, hangs above the motherboard. Cables are generally kept out of the way, with many stored beside the PSU or held together towards the rear of the case, but there’s limited scope for pernickety cable-tidying in a chassis so small.

One thing that’s lacking, unsurprisingly, is upgrade room. A Blu-ray drive occupies the single 5.25in bays, both 3.5in bays are occupied, and the ASRock Z77E-ITX motherboard is fit to burst. Its two memory slots, single PCI Express x16 socket and three of its four SATA ports are occupied and, even if you were to add more storage or an additional optical drive, there’s nowhere for it to go. The backplate offers four USB 3 sockets, eSATA, a clear CMOS button and single-band 802.11n wireless.

Not that you’ll need much upgrade room for several years. The processor’s speed boost from 3.4GHz to 4.2GHz is modest by high-end PC standards – we’ve seen the chip used here, the Core i5-3570K, hit 4.8GHz – and it helped the Titan Prodigy return a benchmark score of 1.09. That’s a little slower than the fastest systems we’ve seen, but it’s more than enough grunt to cast aside any application, and the 8GB of RAM helps keep things fluid during multitasking, too.

Gaming horsepower comes from an overclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 provided by KFA2. Its core has been boosted from 1,006MHz to 1,150MHz, and it delivered some of the best benchmarks we’ve seen for a long time. In our Very High test the Titan Prodigy returned a score of 79fps – nine frames quicker than the GTX 680 manages at its stock speed. The Wired2Fire Hellspawn Predator, one of our favourite base units, scored just 63fps.