StormForce Ventus
Fast in all the right areas, but Yoyotech’s Ryzen-based alternative makes this Intel system look expensive
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from zoostorm.com
The StormForce Ventus comes in a white, glass-sided chassis that’s similar to the Yoyotech Redback N5 ( see opposite). Power it on, however, and it immediately expresses its own personality: a bank of multicoloured internal LEDs springs to life, cycling rapidly through seven colours and evoking the spirit of a 1970s discotheque.
Happily, you don’t have to live with this all the time. Tap the LED control button at the top of the case and the lights step through a series of programmes, including more restful pulsing transitions and static single-colour options. It’s showy, but it does add some visual interest to what would otherwise be a rather uninteresting view – there’s no glowing signature heatsink to ogle here, just a regular set of PC internals.
While the Ventus’ innards might not be beautiful, they’re certainly capable. Beneath the substantial Akasa Nero 3 cooler sits an Intel Core i7-7700 processor – one of the most powerful chips in the current Kaby Lake family. Only the i7-7700K offers more performance, thanks to its unlocked design that lets enthusiasts dial up the clock speeds beyond their standard settings.
Factor in 16GB of 2.4GHz DDR4 RAM, with two spare DIMM sockets for future expansion, and you’re looking at a beast of a PC that will race through almost any desktop task you care to throw at it: in our application benchmarks it achieved an overall score of 151. If that sounds mediocre next to the 200+ scores we’re seeing from AMD Ryzen systems, it bears repeating that Kaby Lake wins out in single-threaded tasks such as image editing. If you don’t deal with heavily parallel workloads on a regular basis, the performance gap isn’t as stark as it appears.
Alongside that weighty processor, Zoostorm includes a formidable 8GB GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card. This is basically the same card as found in Yoyotech’s Redback N5, and 3D performance was all but identical. In Metro: Last Light Redux, the Ventus kept up a slick 76fps at Full HD resolution with all detail settings at maximum, and even at 2,560 x 1,440, the game remained more than playable at an average of 44fps. Stepping up to 4K was too much, causing the frame rate to drop below 20fps. The Ventus is built on an Asus Prime H270-Pro motherboard, which supports a pair of USB 3 connectors at the front along with a brace of USB 2 ports. It’s decently equipped at the rear too, offering two USB 2 ports, two USB 3 ports, two 10Gbits/sec USB 3.1 ports and a single USB 3 Type-C connector.
One interesting feature of this motherboard is the provision of twin internal M.2 connectors. One of these comes populated with the Ventus’ system drive, a 256GB WD Black SSD, which takes advantage of M.2’s huge
“The Ventus is a terrifically solid system, with an eyecatching case and enough power to saunter through most tasks”
bandwidth to offer performance that SATA drives can’t match: we measured sequential read and write speeds of 1,508MB/sec and 672MB/sec respectively.
The other is empty, meaning you can easily add a second high-speed SSD if you wish. This second slot is connected to a PCI-E x2 bus, so its bandwidth is limited to 2GB/sec rather than the 4GB/sec maximum supported by the M.2 standard, but that shouldn’t hold you back too much. At any rate, it will be a while before you run out of storage: the WD SSD is accompanied by a 3TB mechanical disk for your personal data.
A final thoughtful touch is the inclusion of an 802.11n wireless card. That’s welcome in these days when most homes have a fast wireless network in place. Unfortunately, it’s 2.4GHz-only; that might be fine if you live in a relatively interferencefree area, but in my home it delivers less than half the speed of the less cluttered 5GHz band. In a PC costing £1,500 (inc VAT) I’d hoped for something a bit more forward-looking.
Still, the Ventus is a terrifically solid system, with an eye-catching case and enough power to saunter through most tasks. The only real problem is that now Ryzen has come along to put the squeeze on Intel, the price seems rather steep. Yes, the Ventus has more storage and a wireless card, and a DVD writer is unexpectedly thrown in too. If single-core performance is your top priority then the complete package might well be worth £200 more. If you’re looking for a generalpurpose personal PC, however, then right now I would opt for the AMD alternative and save a bit of cash in the process.