ASUS Sensei
Designed and built for desktop gaming at the top level.
The Sensei is the third and fastest option in ASUS’s new Water Cooled line and it knocks the frame rates up another notch thanks to higher-end core components — although the water cooling is essentially the same as the Ninja and Samurai.
The basis for the Sensei build is the ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero Alpha squeezed inside the stylish, tempered-glass clad In Win 909 case. Sitting pretty under a Bitspower water block is the top shelf Intel Core i7-6700K — a 4GHz quad-core part that boosts to 4.2GHz. Of course, stock performance is not the name of the game, so the processor has been pushed all the way up to 4.8GHz. Importantly, the configuration has been fully tested by ASUS’s engineers (and the BIOS settings provided to system builders), to ensure a stable and reliable PC that can be run 24/7. Graphics get the same treatment, with a blazing-fast ASUS STRIX GeForce GTX 980 Ti with the stock heatsink removed in favour of another Bitspower water block. The cooling system’s constructed from rigid acrylic tubing, routed to avoid unnecessary bends, and feeding into a large rearmounted 360mm radiator. The end result is a powerful gaming PC that stays cool and (relatively) quiet under load, whilst also looking great. The Sensei includes a huge 32GB of Kingston HyperX Savage 3000MHz CL15 DDR4 RAM, installed as 4 x 8GB DIMMS. For storage, the system has a Kingston M.2 HyperX SSD as the high speed OS drive, and a 3TB HDD for extra space.
No surprises in testing — the Sensei can power 1080p gaming without batting an eye, and has the grunt to drive modern titles at higher resolutions up to and beyond 1440p.
Depending on the game, the Sensi’s powerful enough to crank decent framerates in 4K, but if that is the aim, consider an upgrade of another GPU in SLI. For those who like to LAN, be warned that the Sensei is a heavy machine, which makes it a bit of a chore to set up and pack away.
Thanks to the ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Hero Alpha motherboard, the Sensei is chock a block full of internal and external connectivity options. Annoyingly though, the water-cooling hardware can restrict access to the rear ports, and the cable routing in the area could perhaps be better. The PC has 2x2 802.11ac MU-MIMO Wi-Fi (with antenna), which provides a solid enough connection for low ping gaming, as well as copying large files or streaming media. Internally it has dual U.2 sockets, M.2 (in use), 6 x SATA 6Gbps connections, as well as six of both USB 3.0 and 2.0 via headers. Round the back the system has 2 x USB 2.0, 2 x USB 3.0, and both Type-A and Type-C USB 3.1 for super-fast transfers. It also has SupremeFX audio, with 5 x 3.5mm audio jacks, and S/PDIF output.
While the Sensei does command a price premium that does reflects the extra effort that’s gone into testing and building a high-spec yet reliable gaming machine. For those who want peace of mind and a blazing fast, custom-cooled overclocked system, that’s a worthy trade off.