PC Specialist Inferno R1
Hot stuff, cool price
It’s always exciting to read about the biggest or best or fastest new thing. Well, exciting at first. Then, as you plough through the details of the advanced technology packed into this groundbreaking gizmo, a sense of déjà vu takes over. Because no matter what amazing features are listed, or how sleek and shiny the hardware looks, the end of the story is always the same: a price tag twice your budget.
An excellent PC offering pace, power and versatility at a reasonable price
That’s why we’re more impressed, here at Computeractive, when manufacturers put their efforts into offering something special for the price of average. And this desktop PC tower contains two new components that take average to new heights. AMD’S Ryzen 5 3600X is the first CPU we’ve seen from the third generation of this processor family, sticking with six cores, each running up to two threads at a time, but with the base clock speed increased from 3.6 to 3.8GHZ and significantly bigger internal caches.
You don’t have to know much about chip design to guess this is all fairly minor tinkering, but in our tests it was enough to show clear advantages over Intel’s rival i5 series. We’re used to seeing Ryzens perform well in multitasking, and here the Inferno R1 came within a whisker of an Intel i7-9700 PC with the same 16GB of memory – yes, that’s an eight- core i7. This is usually where we add the caveat that many of the jobs you’ll do won’t actually use all the cores. But in our single-core image-editing test, the 3600X actually beat the i7-9700. That makes it extraordinary value for money, and if you like a bit of tinkering yourself, it’s overclockable too, with a watercooling system fitted inside the Inferno R1 that’ll help to make this feasible.
On the graphics side, the Geforce RTX 2060 Super is a tweaked edition of the card that sits near the bottom of Nvidia’s latest raytracing- equipped range, adding a bit of extra processing power and 2GB of its own memory to match the 8GB of top-end GPUS. The gains in practice are minor, but our tests confirmed the Inferno R1 will run any game at maximum graphics quality in Full HD or 1440p fast enough to take advantage of a 144Hz monitor, whlle 4K needs at worst minor compromises.
The Asus TUF X470-plus Gaming motherboard isn’t as future-proof as some, but few users ever upgrade their CPU, and it does have a free PCIE 4.0 M.2 socket for the very fastest SSDS. The 256GB drive that comes installed is PCIE 3.0, but delivered healthy read and write speeds of 2,315 and 1,276 megabytes per second respectively in our tests. There’s also a 2TB hard drive for the rest
SPECIFICATIONS
3.8GHZ AMD Ryzen 5 3600X 6-core processor • 16GB memory • 8GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 2060 Super graphics • 256GB SSD • 2TB hard drive • USB-C port • 2x USB 3 Gen2 ports • 3x USB 3 Gen1 ports • 4x USB 2.0 ports • Gigabit Ethernet • 802.11n Wi-fi • HDMI and Displayport outputs • Windows 10 Home • **DIMENSIONS TO COME** (HXWXD) • One-year warranty www.snipca.com/32630 of your files.
One PCIE x16 and two PCIE x1 slots, two RAM sockets and five SATA connections are also available, with mounts for one 3.5in drive and two 2.5in, but there’s no front panel opening for a DVD burner. Peripheral connections are nothing special, but a couple of the USB ports are 10Gbps for fast SSDS.
VERDICT There’s very little you can’t do with this PC, and for the money it’s a clear winner
ALTERNATIVE
Overclockers XVI Gamer £900 A Ryzen 5 2600 chip, GTX 1660 Ti graphics and slow SSD show where the Inferno excels