It may not look like it, but there’s something very special inside this £2,400 PC
Scan builds a thoroughbred gaming PC around Intel’s Core i7-8086K processor. It’s expensive but worth it
PRICE £2,000 (£2,400 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk (use code LN84893)
At the very start of June, when I originally approached Scan to provide a top-end PC for this month’s issue, the company suggested AMD’s Ryzen 2 chip would make a great foundation. And for good reason. This is the chip that powered two of three award winners in last month’s powerhouse PCs group test ( see issue 286, p74), including Scan’s own 3XS Gamer.
The following morning, 40 years to the day since Intel released its landmark 8086 microprocessor ( see opposite), my phone buzzed. “Have you heard about the 8086K Intel has released at Computex?”asked Scan’s technical specialist.
Rather than admit my ignorance, I quickly scanned the headlines from the show and said of course, how could he even begin to think I’d miss such a landmark announcement. He paused, clearly not believing a word of my lies. “We’d like to use that instead of the Ryzen 2.”
I agreed, explaining that I’d been thinking the very same thing.
A monster arrives
The following week, Scan’s box arrives. Packed to the gills with protective packaging, it’s worth noting that Scan pays attention to the little things in a way others don’t. For instance, each machine comes with a build form that lists all the components and details the checks your PC has been put through, while a rescue USB flash drive is Velcroed into its innards.
Scan tends not to bling its gaming PCs to the max, in stark contrast to the Palicomp Intel i7 Nebula that won our Labs. Instead, the Vengeance Ti is dressed in a relatively sombre Corsair Carbide 275R case. This is where Scan saves some money, because it’s a mid-range case finished in plastic rather than the brushed aluminium it aims to emulate. Considering all the power packed within, it’s a compact chassis at 225 x 460 x 455mm, but that still leaves plenty of room inside for watercooling kits – which is fortunate, because Scan includes a Corsair H100i watercooling unit to keep the CPU at a comfortable temperature.
The Corsair theme extends to a 650W Corsair RMX 80Plus Gold power supply and 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory, split across two 3,000MHz DIMMs. These slot into Asus’ ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming motherboard, with two further DIMM sockets free if you decide to upgrade in the future.
The case includes tempered glass for you to gaze lovingly through, but again you shouldn’t expect a full lightshow. The EVGA graphics card, which consumes two backplates, backlights its name, while Asus pimps the Strix with one programmable light, but that’s your lot. Instead, feast your eyes on Scan’s pristine internal wiring, with nothing to get in the way of future upgrades.
Scan already supplies an Asus PCE-N15 wireless expansion card in this configuration, but there are four slots free: one PCIe x1 slot below the graphics card, two PCIe x16 slots, and one more PCIe x1 slot sandwiched in between. With high-end audio already included as part of the Asus ROG motherboard, there are no obvious upgrades other than a second GeForce graphics card.
Nor is there any immediate need for upgrades elsewhere, with the specifications list reading like a best of show: the 500GB Samsung 970 Evo NVMe M.2 SSD, in particular, is a cutting-edge choice. There’s a 2TB Seagate hard disk for extra storage space, plus room for one more hard disk, but note the lack of housing for an internal DVD writer.
Clock that clock
All these high-end components mean the Scan Vengeance is raring to be overclocked. Scan’s engineers do much of the hard work, with the processor arriving preoverclocked to 5GHz across all six cores (you can push it further yourself if you wish). Factor in the 11GB EVGA GeForce GTX 1080
Ti graphics card, which is also overclocked from 1,556MHz to 1,606MHz, and it was no shock to see this PC race through our benchmarks.
Let’s start with PC Pro’s own, where it stormed to an overall score of 281. That’s fast enough to beat all the PCs in last month’s Labs, but not by a huge margin: the Palicomp Intel i7 Nebula, with a Core i7-8700K overclocked to 4.8GHz, 16GB of memory and an 8GB GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, scored 275. And that has the distinct advantage of costing £1,550.
The gulf between last month’s systems and the Vengeance became far more obvious in our gaming benchmarks, with the Scan averaging 65fps in Metro: Last Light at 4K compared to 47fps for the Palicomp (which also topped the table in that benchmark last month). There was an even bigger gap in Rise of the Tomb
Raider at 4K, with the Scan hitting a 67fps average to the sub-50fps we’re used to seeing from GeForce GTX 1080-equipped machines.
The only drawback to such stunning performance is noise. At idle, when it consumes 69W, the Scan produces a hum but nothing distracting. Push it to 100% and the consumption leaps to 380W and the fans roar. You’ll want to turn the speakers up a tad to drown them out.
Vengeance verdict
It’s clear, then, that this is a stupidly fast system if you enjoy games. And a stupidly fun system if you enjoy overclocking. While it would be tempting to say it’s also stupidly expensive, in fact it’s not: sure, you are not getting that much more performance than, say, the Palicomp in last month’s group test, but the Vengeance will nail 60fps at 4K in most modern games, even with settings set to High.
The only real shame is that there’s nothing on the outside that screams how special this machine is. To the casual observer, it’s a basic-looking unit with a 3XS badge on its front. There’s no 8086K sticker and no wild lightshow, so only you will know what a belting machine this is. Still, as they say, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. SPECIFICATIONS 4GHz Intel Core i7K-8086K processor overclocked to 5GHz Asus ROG STRIX Z370-F Gaming motherboard 16GB 3,000MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM 11GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC2 iCX graphics Corsair H100i watercooling 512GB Samsung 970 Evo M.2 PCIe SSD 2TB hard disk Asus PEC-N15 Wi-Fi Windows 10 Home 212 x 361 x 473mm (WDH) 3yr warranty (1yr on-site, 2yr RTB)