PC Specialist Vanquish Enforcer review

PC Specialist is the first system builder we’ve seen to make use of a fourth-generation Haswell processor. Its Vanquish Enforcer uses Intel’s new top-of-the-range Core i7-4770K chip, with Turbo Boost overclocked from 3.5GHz to 4.4GHz.

That represents some serious punch. Even at stock speeds, the i7-4770K delivers excellent desktop performance, and the leap to 4.4GHz allows the PC Specialist to deliver a record-breaking benchmark score of 1.3. By comparison, the A-Listed CyberPower Infinity Fusion GT ups its third-generation Core i5 processor to 4.6GHz, but it scored 1.19 overall. In short, there’s more than enough power here to brush aside even the most demanding applications.

The overclocked processor isn’t the Enforcer’s only new component – PC Specialist has also installed Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 780 graphics card. The GPU still uses last year’s Kepler architecture and a 28nm manufacturing process, but its GK110 core has been beefed up in several key areas, with 2,304 stream processors – more than any last-generation Nvidia card – and a widened 384-bit memory bus. GPU Boost technology gives the base clock of 863MHz a small lift to 900MHz.

In our tests, this allowed the PC Specialist to romp through our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis benchmark at 96fps. On a single screen, you won’t notice a difference between this and the 80fps scored by CyberPower’s machine, but if you intend to stretch to triple-panel gaming, the extra grunt will help keep things smooth.

This sort of muscle eats up a lot of electrical power: in our tests, the Enforcer hit a peak draw of 425W. However, thanks in part to Haswell’s power-saving optimisations, we measured an idle power draw of only 65W – almost 30% lower than the CyberPower’s result of 92W.