PC SPECIALIST ENIGMA ZEN
Great games performance, and generally a speedy machine, but you can buy a faster CPU for this price
On arrival, the biggest mystery about PC Specialist’s Enigma Zen was how to turn down its dazzling light show, with LEDs in the fans pulsing green once a second, emitting a baleful glare through the front vents and the transparent side panel. Fans of PC illumination are in for a treat here, with configurable lighting via app or bundled remote control, although the instructions are somewhat confusing. We found it a challenge just to turn the lighting off.
The Enigma Zen is based around a large Game Max Falcon tower chassis, with the Asus Prime A320M-K microATX motherboard looking almost tiny inside the cavernous space. That’s partly because the drives are tucked inside a cage in a separate compartment next to the Corsair VS450 PSU, with no other drive cage left within the system. That’s a problem if you’re planning to add capacity or set up a RAID. However, a 250GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk mean you won’t be short of space for now.
Elsewhere, the manufacturer has made some interesting choices. On the one hand, you have a Zotac GeForce GTX 1060 3GB graphics card plus 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM, yet underneath the massive Cooler Master Hyper 212X cooler sits not some superpowered six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 7, but a more modest quadcore, four-thread Ryzen 3 1300X, running at between 3.5 and 3.8GHz.
The idea seems to have been to spend some of the CPU budget on more powerful components elsewhere, and up to a point it pays off. The PC Specialist isn’t notably slower in our Rise of the Tomb Raider or Metro: Last Light 3D gaming benchmarks than systems with the same GPU but a faster CPU, although it falls behind slightly at 1440p resolutions with all the detail settings maxed out (where Metro becomes unplayable in any case).
When it comes to standard 2D application benchmarks, however, the Enigma Zen falls a little further behind the pace. It’s still fast enough for even more demanding applications, but if you need serious image-editing or video-editing horsepower, look towards our award winners instead. Still, this is a decent gaming system with room to grow, if not such a winner for non-gamers.