FALCON SENTINEL GT
Another PC geared for gamers, complete with programmable lighting, and a contender for awards
It just misses out on the awards, but Falcon’s Sentinel GT is a serious contender. Falcon has made some intelligent choices, starting with the Phanteks Eclipse P300 chassis. It’s a smart design, with a robust outer casing and a big tempered glass panel on the left-hand side, giving you a clear view of the interior lit by programmable glowing elements on the Gigabyte motherboard. The space is empty to the point of looking Spartan, with the cabling practically invisible and all drives hidden away in a secondary compartment with the Thermaltake TR2S 500W power supply. Here there’s space for another 3.5in drive plus a 2.5in drive, next to the right-hand panel.
This is an impressively quiet system, even under load, and that Gigabyte motherboard does more than look good. It offers an additional PCI-E 3 x16 slot (running at x4) and great connectivity, including four USB 3.1 Gen 1 ports, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-A ports and a Gigabit Ethernet
port with traffic management for gaming. If that’s your bag, you’ll be delighted to see a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card. With 3GB of GDDR5 RAM it’s not as well-equipped for the demands of 4K gaming as 6GB models, but it’s got enough power for 1080p and even 1440p resolutions; a more realistic target at this price.
This is another high-quality Ryzen system, but one with a handful of compromises. The first is that it uses the entry-level Ryzen 5 CPU; the four-core, eight-thread 1400, running at 3.2GHz to 3.4GHz. It’s a fine CPU and the Falcon didn’t disgrace itself in our application benchmarks, but it fell behind systems with faster Ryzen processors, particularly in the multitasking tests. The Falcon fares better in 3D tests, where it’s up there with the winners, but for all-round performance it’s slightly off the pace.
More seriously, the only storage is a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO M.2 drive. It’s fast enough, with sequential read and write speeds of 508MB/sec and 495.1MB/sec respectively, but the 202GB of space available won’t host a lot of media or applications, especially when some games can now occupy 70GB or more. The Sentinel GT is a fine PC – especially for gamers – but more storage would have given it a stronger balance overall.