PC Specialist Vulcan E1
A solid desktop system for both applications and games, but the overall package is somewhat on the lean side
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪ PRICE from pcspecialist.co.uk
T£582 (£699 inc VAT) he Vulcan E1 follows the same basic formula as the Chillblast Fusion Insight, combining a Core i5-6600 CPU with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. No surprise, then, that its benchmark performance proved almost identical. An overall score of 109 in our application tests is highly respectable, if unexceptional in this group, and an average frame rate of 82fps in our high-resolution Dirt Showdown test indicates plenty of power for gamers.
With that graphics card filling the PCI Express x16 slot, however, you don’t have much scope for internal expansion. The Asus H110M-D D3 motherboard comes with just two empty PCI Express x1 slots – there’s no PCI Express x4 and no conventional PCI for legacy hardware. You also get just two RAM slots, which use DDR3 rather than the more modern DDR4 format. Our benchmarks confirm that the older technology doesn’t harm performance, but if you ever want to take the board up to its full 32GB capacity then you’ll need to shell out for a pair of 16GB DDR3 modules, which might not be easy to find.
The board’s six USB ports (of which three support USB 3) provide scope for hooking up external peripherals. Unusually, the board also offers not only a parallel port at the rear but also a nine-pin serial connector, for those of us with vintage peripherals still in service. But nothing else comes bundled – no optical drive, no card reader and no wireless. A bog-standard 1TB data drive completes the package.
It all comes across as a bit of a barebones offering, compared to the Chillblast with its wireless card and 2TB data drive, or the Mesh with its Core i7 processor. We can’t point to the warranty as a saving grace, either: you get a single year of full coverage, of which carriage and return are covered for only the first 30 days. PC Specialist has received plenty of praise in our Tech Excellence Awards over the years, but this month its rivals have simply managed to squeeze a little more into the budget.