HOMEOFFICEPCs
72 MAY2020|COMPUTERSHOPPER|ISSUE387
NO PRIZES FORguessing which processor is
at the heart of this verbosely titled system,
but it’s not devoid of surprises either.Besides
the choice of acase,aglowingmulticolour
cube amidst the sea of plain black towers that
are the other five PCs on test, AlphaBetaPC
has maxed out the motherboard’s RAM limit
with aworkstation-grade 32GB of DDR4.
That’s an incredible amount of memory
fora£600 PC of any kind, but fornow let’s
keep attention on the chassis; it’s certainly
capable of grabbing it. It’s the same Tsunami
Gorilla case as seen containing the
AlphaBetaPC Intel i5 RTX(Shopper384),
which means the same boxy,GorillaGlass-
covered shape,the same massive 200mm fans
(fitted both at the front and in the roof) and
the same remote-controlled RGB lighting.
Technically this lighting is part of the fan
design, but the bundled remoteisafun
change of tack from the usual desktop
software.With asinglebutton press you
can change both fans to asinglematching
colour,orcycle between various effects
that span awider range of the spectrum.
There’s even aspeed control forthe more
animated effects, which cantone down
their considerable flashiness.
ANDNOPLAY
Despitethis inclusion of adesignfeature
that’s farmore prevalent on gaming systems
–not to mention the word ‘Gaming’ in the
name –the AMD Ryzen 53400G Gaming
Desktop PC is specced much more forwork
than play. The quad-core,eight-thread Ryzen
processor makes full use of itsintegrated
Vega 11 graphics, so there’s no dedicated GPU,
and 32GB of RAM is farmore than any game
would need to run at its best –though not
toomuchfor high-end productivity software.
Unfortunately,such vast reserves of
memory aren’t enough to elevate what is a
thoroughlymiddling CPU. The Ryzen 53400G
only put forth enough horsepower for
benchmark scores of 139inthe image test,
149 in the video test, 162 in the multitasking
test and 154 overall. Our tests take RAM into
account, but it’s telling the AMD Ryzen 5
3400G Gaming Desktop PC’s multitasking
result is less than half that of the Chillblast
Fusion Dauntless Family PC. This has 16GB of
RAM, as do all the other PCs here,but its
more powerful CPU is still dramatically faster
in heavily multithreaded workloads.
The AlphaBetaPC system also sits
joint-bottom of the pack on image test scores,
ALPHABETAPCAMDRyzen5
3400GGamingDesktopPC
★★★★★
£600•From http://www.alphabetapc.com
VERDICT
Heapsof memoryandapremiumchassisdisguise
whatisultimatelyvanillaperformance
although anecdotally we
didn’t notice it being
much slower than the
Fusion Dauntless when
performing basic tasks
such as web browsing and
installing applications. It’s
also much more powerful
than any £600 laptop you
could possibly find; it’s just
that should you ever need to run
more demanding programs, it’s not
clear why you’d settle foritwhen much faster
desktops are available forthe same price.
More positively,the storage here is good.
Youget anicely spacious 480GB NVMe
SSD and a1TB hard disk,soofall the six PCs
here,only the Aria Gladiator Paradigm offers
greater capacity –and even then, only by a
handful of gigabytes.
READ DEMON
The SSD is also alot quicker than the
Gladiator Paradigm’s, at least forread
speeds. Using the AS SSD benchmark, we
recorded asequential read speed of
1,559MB/s and asequential writespeed of
877MB/s; Aria’s scored 761MB/s and
697MB/s respectively.The writing difference
is minor,but since read speeds affect how
quickly files and applications load, the
advantage is alot more noticeable.
It’s still nowhere near as fast as the SSDs
within the Palicomp Intel i5 Mercury and the
Wired2Fire Ultima WS, and both of these are
also much bigger 1TB drives that act as the
sole storage drive in their respective PCs.
However,while this means they’re not slowed
down by mechanical storage,italsomeans
that totalcapacity is lower than that of the
AMD Ryzen 53400G Gaming Desktop PC.
This is afairly upgradable system as well.
The case only supports amicroATX
motherboard, but its neat dual-chamber
layout finds room fortwo 3.5in drive trays
and two 2.5in trays, all but one of which is
already occupied. The use of integrated
graphics also helps keep the motherboard
free,leaving one PCI-E x16 slot and two PCI-E
x1 slots available forexpansion. There are no
free RAM slots, but then it’s unlikely you’d
ever need more than 32GB anyway.
That used-up x1 slot, by theway,contains
an 802.11n Wi-Fi card, ahandy wireless
alternative to the Gigabit Ethernet port.
Otherwise,connectivity is fine,ifseldom
exciting: you get two USB2 ports and one
USB3 port on the front, adding to the two
USB2 ports, four USB3 ports and two PS/2
ports on the rear.
LIGHT SHOW
Since there’s no graphics card, your
monitor will need to connect to one of the
motherboard I/O panel’s outputs. Youonly
get achoice of HDMI or dual-link DVI-D,
which isn’t ideal. It’s enough fordual
monitors, but DVIcan’t carry audio,and
has lower resolution/refresh ratesupport
than HDMI or DisplayPort. The Intel i5
Mercury is better in this regard.
In fact, it’s better in alot of ways, and
besides high storage capacity there’s not a
lot that the AMD Ryzen 53400G Gaming
Desktop PC can convincingly claim in its
defence.The fancy light-up case makes it
distinct, but is also alittle incongruous given
this isn’t arealgaming PC, and the benefits of
the extra RAM are limited with aCPU slower
than its rivals. It’s still adecent desktop,but
there are others here that are truly great.
