PC Specialist Vanquish X79 review

It only launched last month, but already PC Specialist’s Vanquish X79 is the third PC we’ve seen with a factory-fresh Intel Core i7-3930K processor in its LGA 2011 socket. It’s already a monster, but here it’s overclocked from its stock speed of 3.2GHz to 4.6GHz – not quite the highest we’ve seen, but still a mouth-watering prospect.

Last month we saw the Scan 3XS Velocity X79 SLI Extreme and Chillblast Fusion Photo OC IV both running at 4.7GHz, and they scored 1.34 and 1.39 in our benchmarks. The PC Specialist finished just behind them with an overall 1.31. Don’t let that gap put you off: by all other standards it’s a stupendously fast PC, and it excelled itself in the intensive video and 3D-rendering segments of our tests, with individual results of 1.91 and 1.83.

Like the Scan, this PC packs a pair of Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 cards. They’re not overclocked to the same degree as Scan’s cards – the 775MHz core is here boosted to 783MHz, rather than 797MHz – but it’s a pairing that packs a punch. An average of 85fps in our Very High quality Crysis test makes it one of the fastest gaming PCs we’ve seen below two grand.

The third limelight-hogging component is the SSD. Kingston’s Hyper X offers a middling 120GB of capacity, but performance is superb: large-file write and read speeds of 485MB/sec and 451MB/sec are faster than every SSD in our recent Ultimate PC Labs. Its small-file write and read results of 115MB/sec and 44MB/sec are slower, but still ahead of most SSDs. Alongside it, PC Specialist has gone for the standard 1TB hard disk, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a Blu-ray drive.

It’s all packaged into a familiar case, too. The Corsair Carbide 400R is tall and matte black, an undeniable head-turner, even if the build quality is slightly disappointing. There’s a bit of give in the bulging side panels, and the meshing at the front of the machine could be stronger.

But it’s far better on the inside. Cables are kept out of sight behind the motherboard tray, others are lashed down with cable ties, and the few spares that emerge from the 850W power supply are neatly bundled beneath the hard disk cages. Three side-facing and tool-free hard disk bays lie vacant, and although they’re flimsy, they do contain rubber mounts to absorb vibrations.

Six of its eight DIMMs sockets are also vacant and easily accessible, and the Asus P9X79 Pro motherboard can handle a maximum 64GB of memory. The two hefty graphics cards mean both PCI Express x1 slots are blocked, but there are two more PCI Express x8 sockets free in between the GPUs. Rounding off the connections are four free SATA ports (two at 3Gbits/sec and two at 6Gbits/sec), and the bottom of the motherboard has three free USB 3 headers.

The level of performance calls for plenty of cooling. Two 120mm fans in the front of the machine propel cool air into the chassis, and two 120mm fans in the roof of the case pull it out. The watercooling unit on the CPU has its own 120mm spinner, and each graphics card also has two 70mm fans of its own.

That’s a lot of fans, so it’s no surprise that the processor idled at 45°C and peaked at a respectable 79°C despite the large overclock. Both graphics cards hit peak temperatures of 82°C, a fine distance below their danger threshold.

That cooling, though, also provides the PC Specialist’s biggest headache. The idle rumble it emits is not too bad, but the two graphics cards with four fans between them, and all those other fans in the case, mean it hit an uncomfortable volume during our stress tests and gaming benchmarks. You’ll want a set of speakers to drown it out when you’re gaming.

The PC Specialist does have its flaws, then, but they’re mainly a result of it being a frighteningly powerful system. It costs a bit more than the Chillblast and it’s certainly noisier, but it’s also much faster in games. As long as you can drown that noise out, the Vanquish X79 is an impressive high-end gaming package.

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