Thermaltake Citadel desktop PC
Thermaltake’s Mini-ITX pre-built PC puts some serious firepower in a compact little tower. PRICE $2,399 ONLINE lcgs.thermaltake.com. au
Just from a glance at the spec sheet of Thermaltake’s latest gaming tower, The Citadel, is enough to show you that it’s a carefully considered system that balances performance against cost for a great overall configuration. The Citadel comes in just one variation that features an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, an Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU and 16GB of RAM, but as a standard-component gaming PC you can customise it to whatever you want once you get it home… if you feel the need to.
The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 might seem a little dated now that you can get the Ryzen 5 5600X, but that new processor is only around 15 percent better in general performance (7 percent in gaming) and costs 45 percent more than its predecessor. So including the Ryzen 5 3600 is actually a sensible choice for a price conscious gaming PC. This CPU is managed by Thermaltake’s TH120 all-in-one RGB liquid cooler which kept the CPU under 70 degrees across all our benchmarks. That’s plenty of overhead for anyone interested in overclocking the CPU a little further to push that peak performance as high as it goes.
The GPU is an aftermarket card from Asus’s TUF range that offers a triple fan array and manufacturer overclocking to ensure it’s performing as well as it can. Thermaltake has included its own 3600MHz DDR4 ToughRAM sticks that include a nice RGB lighting system that you can sync to the cooler, GPU and motherboard lights for a custom synchronised PC glow.
There’s not a heap of spare slots on the Asus ROG Strix B550-I Gaming AM4 Mini-ITX motherboard, but with gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6 AX200 wireless networking, a few USB ports (2xType-A, 2xType-C), and 3.5mm audio, mic and line-out ports there’s enough interface options to connect the all essentials.
It’s not a micro PC by any stretch, but put it up next to a full tower and it is less than half the size so it’ll look super sleek for anyone used to big rigs. The Thermaltake Tower 100 Mini Case is taller and has a smaller footprint than many Mini-ITX cases which means the motherboard sits on the back with the GPU running vertically. This creates a nice looking arrangement that is super efficient on space. Cable management and hard drive bays are concealed behind a partition at the back while the Thermaltake Smart 600W 80+ Gold Power Supply is hidden neatly at the base.
The Citadel punches above its weight in terms of performance. With two to three times the performance of today’s top ultrabooks in media encoding benchmarks, this machine has more than enough raw power for demanding CPU heavy tasks. It also offers 90fps+ frame rates for demanding modern shooters on 1080p Ultra settings and can even manage playable frame rates using 4K Ultra or 1080p ray tracing scenarios on current titles.
The $2,399 asking price is fair when you add up just how nice and compact this system is as a whole, but you can certainly find a better deal on a similar unit if you’re happy to sacrifice on the form factor and overall sleek design of The Citadel. JOEL BURGESS