PC Specialist Enigma K7
Desktop PC that’s just grand
What is it about 99s? Not the ice creams with flakey sticks – their popularity is easily explained by the delicious vanilla and chocolatey taste. No, we mean the 99s on the end of prices. According to legend, they were introduced by shopkeepers who wanted to make sure their assistants would always have to open the till to give change, thus removing the temptation to slip round-numbered banknotes straight into their own pockets.
This, of course, makes absolutely no sense: they could just as easily open the till, hand back the penny and palm the note up their sleeve. Clearly, the truth is that those shopkeepers realised they could trick unsuspecting customers into spending an amount that sounded less than it was. A tenner for a burger and chips? Ridiculous! Nine ninety-nine? Ker-ching!
And thus we have the £999 PC. Interestingly, though, the vagaries of today’s computer market make it tricky to stick to these shifty strategies. We’ve tested several systems in the past few months, like the Wired2fire Pyro Reactor (see our review Issue 516) and PC Specialist’s Enigma X02 (Issue 522, page 20), that started out at a tad under a thousand pounds but, as component prices rose, became more expensive over time. At the time of writing, the Enigma K7 was listed at exactly £999, and with or without the missing quid we’d be very happy to pay that for it.
Behind the PC Specialist logo is a Corsair Red Carbide SPEC-04 case with the kind of polygonal panels, see-through elements and LED lighting that are designed to make you feel like you’ve got your money’s worth. Inside, you’ll find Intel’s latest six- core i5-8600k processor, overclocked to a zippy 4.1GHZ and accompanied by 16GB of memory, Windows 10 installed on an SSD, a 1TB hard drive for the rest of your stuff, and a 6GB Geforce GTX 1060 graphics card for your 3D gaming or creative software needs.
As regular readers of our reviews will recognise, that’s pretty much the perfect specification at the moment for a do-it-all system at a sensible price, and our tests confirmed it. The weakest link is the SSD, which is installed on the potentially faster M.2 interface but doesn’t use the latest NVME technology. That means it’s playing in the 500Mb-per-second Championship rather than the 1Gb-plus Premier League, but it’s enough to help the Enigma K7 feel responsive even in demanding tasks.
The accompanying hard drive is – as always – much slower, and most of your files will have to go on this, because the SSD’S 128GB capacity – half what we typically see these days – won’t accommodate much beyond your regularly used programs.
Adding a faster M.2 drive would be simple, though, and there’s room for other kinds of expansion too, including a second graphics card. Neat cable routing lets you see what’s what, and connections are already in place for the three spare hard-drive bays, although there’s nowhere to put a DVD or Blu-ray drive. The solid processor will cope well with future upgrades, although it’s a pity the Coolermaster Hyper 212X heat sink and fan that makes the overclock possible overhangs one of the two spare memory slots. If you want more than 16GB, consider ordering it at the start. Altogether, this may not be quite the perfect £999 system, but it’s not much more than 0.1 per cent off.
Has the perfect specification for a do-it-all system at a sensible price