PC Specialist Inferno L2
Water-cooled PC warms to its tasks
Whatever you’re buying, if you want the best but also want value for money, a good tip is often to look a step or two below the priciest option. Walk into any well-stocked local pub, for example, and ask for their most expensive bottle of wine, and your host will be only too happy to visit the dusty rack holding a single case of a ludicrously rare vintage acquired some years earlier from an unscrupulous merchant, and present you with the sort of bill you’ve only previously seen at a car showroom. The next most expensive bottle, on the other hand, could have been yours for £39.50, and very tasty too.
So it goes with graphics cards. At the top of Nvidia’s current consumer range is the Geforce RTX 2080 Ti, which will set you back about a grand, or rather more, depending on which manufacturer’s tweaked variation you choose. However, unless beating the most enthusiastic Russian teenagers in the very latest 3D games on the very highest graphics settings is your first and possibly only goal in life, this is probably not the best way to spend your money. The plain RTX 2080 is good enough for almost anyone at just over £600, and the RTX 2070 Super that PC Specialist has chosen here can be had for under 500 quid. Yet in our tests, the only way to give it any problems at all was to run the most demanding titles at 4K resolution – four times the Full HD that most of us would consider perfectly adequate. Many games, indeed, were super-smooth at 4K, just not all.
The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor is a similarly sensible option. It’s not a 16- core 3950X, although PC Specialist will do you one of those for an extra £250, and you might consider it if you have ambitious tasks like 4K video editing and effects in mind, which will benefit more from a faster processor than more graphics frills. But this water-cooled 12-core chip still excelled in our video-editing and multitasking tests. With 16GB of memory, Windows 10 installed on a very fast 512GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVME SSD (see our review, Issue 552, page 26) and a 2TB hard drive included for space, you’d be hard pushed to call this configuration a compromise.
The motherboard, it’s true, is not the most up to date. Asus’s Tuf X470-plus dates from 2018, but it does the job, providing a second M.2 socket for a second SSD as well as two more memory slots, even if they’re a bit fiddly
Sensible processor and graphics choices make this a desktop PC to be reckoned with
SPECIFICATIONS
3.8GHZ Intel AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-core processor • 16GB memory • 8GB Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super graphics • 512GB SSD • 2TB hard drive • Gigabit Ethernet • 802.11n Wi-fi • HDMI and Displayport outputs • Windows 10 Home • 427x201x445mm (HXWXD) • One-year warranty www.snipca.com/33860
to get at. Two more hard-drive bays are available on the right of the Thermaltake V200 chassis, while the left panel is glazed, and the three front fans are among numerous parts with controllable multi-coloured LED lighting (pictured above). With the silicon drawing a hefty 344 watts at peak load, those fans can get audible, but most of the time there’s just a low hum to remind you of the power at the ready under your desk.