PCSpecialist Aurora R
A sound foundation if you are looking for a PC on which to build, but set your expectations low for now
We don’t normally comment on the weight of desktop PCs, but after heaving around the more expensive machines we confess to being taken aback by just how light the Aurora R is. You feel like a superhero, such is the ease with which this tower system lifts. There are two main reasons for this disconnect between brain and reality. First, it’s genuinely light, with a basic chassis with thin metal sides; there’s no tempered glass, nor shedloads of components weighing it down. And second, it’s a full-size tower chassis so it feels like it should be as heavy as the other systems from PCSpecialist.
The plus point to having so little inside such a capacious case is the luxury of room. Any upgrades you wish to perform in the future will be easy. More RAM? There are three sockets free, with a single 8GB Corsair Vengeance stick in place. Want to add a graphics card? The Asus Prime B560-Plus’ main x16 PCI Express sits unimpeded in the middle of the board, with two more lying empty – one physical x16 slot, another x1. And if the provided 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD isn’t enough, a second slot lies empty.
The chassis includes one bay for 3.5in drives and two places to screw in 2.5in SSDs, and whilst we see more generous options elsewhere that should be enough. Still, if you had a dream of upgrading to a four-drive RAID array, this isn’t your machine. There’s potential for adding an optical drive, with a cutout at the front under the array of ports: two USB-A 2, one USB-A 3 and two 3.5mm jacks.
We criticise the PCSpecialist Fusion R for its 450W power supply, but its inclusion makes much more sense here. The Aurora R idles at 28W and peaks at 205W, so there’s plenty of headroom if and when you do add a graphics card.
This is particularly true when the natural partner for the Intel Core i5-11400 processor that PCSpecialist provides is a mid-range graphics card, which is unlikely to need more than 100W. We would argue that a higher-spec card would be a waste, because the CPU would – to put it in basic terms – struggle to keep up.
Not that the i5-11400 is slow. We’re delighted to see that it’s an 11th-generation Core processor, bringing with it plenty of single-core speed. With a boost speed of up to 4.4GHz it’s capable of excellent performance, even with the basic Intel cooler provided. For instance, it was faster than the far more expensive Acer Predator Orion 3000 in both the Geekbench 5 and Cinebench R23 single-core tests – and held its own in the multicore sections too. It was only in PC Pro’s benchmarks, which focus on intensive encoding tasks and multitasking, that the Aurora R fell significantly behind its pricier rivals.
We can’t be so glowing about this PC’s performance in our gaming tests, but it was faster than its similarly priced Acer and Dell rivals. That’s the benefit of Intel’s UHD Graphics 730 compared to the UHD Graphics 630 found in tenth-generation
Core processors. Take 3DMark Time Spy, the only gaming test that the Acer completed without crashing, where the Fusion R scored 557 to the
Aspire’s 376.
The Aurora R was also faster than the Dell in every gaming test, with the highlight being 38fps in
Dirt: Showdown at 1080p compared to the Inspiron’s 18fps. It was also almost twice as fast in the GFXBench OpenGL Car Chase off-screen test, with 38fps to 22fps. So this machine is capable of some very lightweight 3D gaming at lower resolutions, but keep your expectations dampened. For example, Minecraft runs at smooth frame rates but you’re better off keeping settings at Medium or Low.
So where does this leave the Aurora R? We’re still not a fan of its size when you consider the power on offer, as it just seems wasteful. But if you’re looking for a base on which to build, it’s great. It’s also quiet in general use – when idling it’s a pussy cat, even if it upgrades to a lion’s roar when faced with challenges. But perhaps that’s the right metaphor for this system: tame today, but with potential to go wild in the future.