PC Specialist Vortex I950 Review

Vital Stats

Price £1,749
Manufacturer PC Specialist
CPU 3.07GHz Intel Core i7 950
Motherboard Asus P6T
GPU GTX295
RAM 12GB DDR3
Storage 500GB+ 1TB HDD
Optical DVD re-writer
OS Vista Home Premium 64-bit

The Vortex of the latest Core i7

Seven, it seems, is the magic number in the PC realm right now. Not only has Microsoft’s latest operating system been baptised with the numeric title, but Intel’s Core i7 is the processor du jour. It’s making me wonder if there’s a Dan Brown-style conspiracy afoot, and whether as soon as we add a graphics card with ‘seven’ in its name to this PC, a mystical vortex to another world will open up.

PC Specialist has, regrettably, missed the mystical power conjunction the ‘seven’ opportunity offers its new machine, but it has entitled it ‘Vortex’ – maybe as some kind of conspiracy-theorist-enticing hint at the unlockable dimension gate within. And as far as combinations go, the Vortex i950’s is pretty much unbeatable, and comes complete with a decent Core i7, a GTX295 and 12GB RAM for less than £2,000. Win.

It’s somewhat surprising that PC Specialist has managed to bring its PC in at such a low price considering the graphics card, memory and CPU alone combine to about £1,000. When that’s added to a quality case with liquid cooling and 1.5TB of storage, it’s hard to see how PC Specialist is making any profit at all. The Vortex i950 didn’t let us down in our tests, either. The 950 is a powerful little chip and we could certainly see the difference it made over the de-facto – albeit cheaper – Core i7 920. It was the increase in X.264 encoding that most impressed here.

The choice of graphics card handled everything we threw at it with aplomb. We hooked the PC up to a 30-inch monitor and it didn’t drop a single frame, even at the highest resolution in the world. In fact, the only slightly dodgy point we could fi nd was that the graphics card made a lot of Spectrum-cassette-loadingesque noises when benchmarking games, but we’re guessing that these sounds were only audible due to the near-silent operation of the PC itself.

Compared with other Core i7-based PCs we’ve looked at, the PC Specialist system sits exactly where we’d expect it to in terms of price and performance: above the 920s, but below last month’s £3,500 965-based Dell behemoth.

This system is half the price of Dell’s and it certainly delivers more than half the performance. If you’ve got the cash to hand, it’s certainly worth considering the PC Specialist option. It would probably cost you about as much to hand-build a similarly specifi ed system, and our benchmarks speak for themselves. We’re still in shock at just how robust this system is and how well it performed in our tests.

Technical analysis
It’s the X.264 processor benchmarks that really impress here. Factory-clocked Core i7 920 results rarely breach 24fps, but here the Core i7 950 ups it to 30fps. The game results are staggering as well; admittedly they’re not as ludicrous as Dell’s system, but they’re still impressive. Expect this machine to last a good three to four years of high-end gaming.