PC Specialist Sabre MK3
Blunt instrument
PC plods with too many compromises
PC ❘ £1,399 from PC Specialist www.snipca.com/35102
We’ve been seeing new laptops for months now with 10th-generation Intel processors, and now at last there are desktop PC versions. This system from Computeractive favourites PC Specialist uses the mid-range i5-10600k chip, installed here at its standard base clock speed of 4.1GHZ but capable of being overclocked even faster. As it stands, it can use Intel’s Turbo Boost to increase its speed to 4.8GHZ, and a particularly chunky CPU fan is fitted to keep it running within Intel’s ambitiously low temperature limit of 70°C. The less heat your processor is pumping out, after all, the more power is being converted into computing.
But the proof is in the pudding, or as we prefer to call it, our series of benchmark tests. The 10th-gen i7 and i9 processors have a new feature called Turbo Boost Max 3, which enables extra speed when the software you’re running uses only some of the available cores. The i5, however, only gets the less enhanced Turbo Boost 2. Even so, in our single-core task the Sabre MK3 was five per cent faster than PC Specialist’s Inferno L2 (£1,499 from www.snipca.com/33860, see our review, Issue 573, page 22) with its AMD Ryzen 9 3900X processor. In games, with both systems relying on the same 8GB Nvidia Geforce RTX 2070 Super graphics card, performance was neck and neck.
Multi-core tasks, however, showed the 12-core Ryzen’s superiority. Overall, the Inferno was 75 per cent faster. You might only occasionally see the full benefit, typically when using more ambitious software – photo or video editing, 3D animation, complex spreadsheets – or running a processor-heavy task in the background, such as converting video files, while also doing other things. But even so, it clearly outweighs any single-core advantage.
As for this particular configuration, it’s further compromised by a slow SATA SSD that was barely twice as fast as the accompanying 2TB hard drive in our storage tests, and the 16GB of memory is supplied as four 4GB modules, leaving no free slots for later upgrades. That’s a shame, because the Asus Prime Z490-P motherboard – one of the new breed required by the 10th-gen Intel chips – has two M.2 storage connectors and four free PCIE slots, one fast enough for a second GPU. Everything comes neatly installed in a minimalist case with an easily removable tempered glass left panel, and we found the system reasonably quiet in use.
Processor and drive compromises will limit this PC’S appeal