CCL DELTA PRO
Not quite an award winner, but if your priority is gaming then you should add the CCL Delta Pro to your shortlist
It’s a case of “close, but no cigar” for the CCL Delta Pro: a thoroughbred PC that came within a whisker of a podium finish. In a way, it crams in some of the best bits of rival systems, with Falcon’s excellent Phantek case, a spec that nearly matches some of the winners and the extra storage that makes the CyberPower such a great buy. It’s such a close call that if your priority is games, we might recommend the CCL instead.
The Phantek case and Asus Prime B-250 Plus motherboard make for a great, forward-looking platform, and it’s hard to fault CCL’s build. The cabling is carefully routed to leave little on display or disrupting airflow, while the drives are squirreled away in a separate compartment, accessible by opening the right-hand-panel and next to the 600W Cooler Master PSU.
That leaves plenty of room to work inside and, while there’s not a lot of space for additional drives, you could easily fit one 3.5in and one 2.5in without any problems. M.2 drives are out of the question given the lack of
motherboard support. The SATA 6GB SSD is a 120GB Adata SU800, which doesn’t leave you with much space once you have Windows and a few applications installed. With sequential read/write speeds of 528MB/sec and 437MB/sec it’s not particularly speedy, and you’ll be glad of the 2TB of capacity the Seagate Barracuda HDD provides.
On the plus side, there’s no shortage of connectivity, with four USB 3 ports and two USB 3.1 ports at the back, along with Gigabit Ethernet. Two more USB 3 ports and audio jacks are easily accessible at the front.
With the quad-core, eight-thread Ryzen 5 1500X processor and 8GB of DDR4-2133 RAM, the CCL is undeniably a fast PC. The 3GB GeForce GTX 1060 processor ensures that it delivers playable 30fps to 60fps frame rates at 1080p resolutions in Rise of
the Tomb Raider and Metro: Last Light, even at high or very high detail levels, and if you’re happy to stick to high detail levels you could be playing at 1440p. It’s a similar story with 2D application performance. The problem is that rival systems give you even more speed, thanks to six-core, 12-thread processors that can churn through complex tasks that bit faster. A great choice for gamers, but mainstream users could do better.