22 AUGUST 2019|COMPUTER SHOPPER|ISSUE 378
£200CANGOalong wayinPCbuilding.
This is well known to anyone who’s attempted
aDIY system: it can upgrade the graphics card
to awhole other tier,itcan massively boost
storage capacity and speed, and it can get
you aCPU with significantly more cores
and multitasking muscle.
However,spread that £200 toothinly,and
what initially seems like amajor overhaul can
end up feeling less worthwhile than if you’d
focused on making just one or two key
upgrades. This is precisely what’s happened
with the Overclockers XVI Gamer: at £900,
it’s £200 more than the Gaming XVI Essential
(Shopper377), and is inarguably amore
powerful and better-equipped system.
Whether it’s worth the extra cash, however,
is adifferent matter.
COMPARE NOTES
First, arundown of what’s different between
the two PCs, and what stays the same.The
most notable non-change is that both have
AMD’s hexa-core Ryzen 52600 CPU, although
since the XVI Gamer has 16GB of RAM –twice
that of the Gaming XVI Essential –itshould
have the edge on multithreaded performance.
Both systems also have a240GB SATA SSD
as their main storage drive,with a1TB hard
disk providing backup capacity.
Here,graphics power is drawn from the
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, adirect –ifminor
–stepupfrom the Gaming
XVI Essential’s GTX 1660.
Both GPUs have 6GB of
GDDR6 memory,but the GTX
1660 Ti has the advantage in
core count, with 1,536 to the
GTX 1660’s 1,408.
The XVI Gamer also
comes, it must be said, in a
much slicker chassis. Instead
of basic black plastic and an
acrylic side window,this PC’s
case is astriking white
number,with afull-sized
tempered glass side panel.
Through the latter,you can
see amuch cleaner internal
chamber,thanks to the PSU
shroud covering up more
components and cables than
the uncovered Gaming XVI
Essential. The front panel is
still made of plastic, but it’s a
pretty good approximation
of metal, and the sharper
OVERCLOCKERS XVIGamer
★★★★★
£900•From http://www.overclockers.co.uk
VERDICT
Agoodall-rounder,butinexchangeforslightly
lesspoweryoucangetamuchbetterdeal
DESKTOPGAMING PC
corners further
contributetoanoverall
more grown-up look.
Except, perhaps, for
the dazzling amount of
RGB lighting. It’s not
that every single
component has its
own LEDs, but aset of
two strips bathe the
entire main chamber
and then some.These
are set to slowly cycle
through different colours by default, and –
almost entertainingly –they’re strong
enough to completely swamp the specks of
additional RGB lighting on the motherboard.
This will appeal to some,ofcourse,but if
you’re not keen on throwing adisco on your
desk, then you can tweak the colours or turn
off the strips entirely.
SAME CHIP,DIFFERENT DAY
CPU performance is, as expected, similar to
that of the Gaming XVI Essential. In our 4K
benchmarks, the XVI Gamer scored 135 in the
image test, 212 in the video test, 248 in the
multitasking test and 217 overall, so anything
from basic browsing to home video editing will
run just fine.The extra RAM doesn’t seem to
make an enormous difference: 248 is anifty
little improvement on the Gaming XVI
Essential’s multitasking score
of 231, but the difference in
overall scores is just 10
points in the more expensive
system’s favour.Ineveryday
use,there wouldn’t be much
of atangible difference unless
you’re regularly hoarding
browser tabs or running
multiple high-intensity
applications at atime.
The GTX 1660 Ti, too,
doesn’t prove itself to be a
particularly pronounced
upgrade on the standard GTX
- The XVI Gamer is still an
appropriately capable gaming
rig: in Metro: Last Light, the
toughest of our test games, it
managed asmooth 62fps at
1,920x1,080 with Very High
quality and SSAA enabled. It
even broke through the
30fps barrier at 2,560x1,440;
with 36fps at this resolution
you can afford to
disable SSAA forabig
jump up to 69fps. 4K
demands greater
sacrifices, as the PC
only makes it to 16fps
with everything maxed
out, but drop down to
High quality with SSAA
off and the resulting
46fps will suffice.
Undemanding games
will zip along, judging by
Dirt Showdown. Here,the XVI Gamer never
required the lowering of settings, as it sailed
to 147fps at 1,920x1,080, 132fps at 2,560x1,440
and 75fps at 3,840x2,160, all with the Ultra
quality preset and 4x MSAA.
By scoring 10.9 in the SteamVR
Performance Test, amere 0.1offaperfect
mark, the XVI Gamer also distinguishes
itself as agreat system forVRgaming.
If you’re unfamiliar with this test, it judges
the extent to which you’d need to lower
graphics quality settings in abig-budget VR
game before achieving astable 90fps; what
ascore of 10.9 means is that you could
happily leave every setting at its best and
still get the requisitesmoothness.
Overshadowing all this success, however,
is the fact that the Gaming XVI Essential
performs almost as well, for£200 less.
The biggest difference in these tests is the
cheaper system scoring 114fps in Dirt
Showdown at 1440p; otherwise,it’s all just
tiny gaps of 10fps or less.
It’s perfectly fair to want that extra sliver of
performance anyway, particularly if you want a
PC formore competitive play. The issue is that
no-one else will see much of abenefit with the
GTX 1660 Ti compared to the GTX 1660.
LOVING MOTHER
There’s no additional storage space,either.
Granted, the SSD’s read speed is respectable
foraSATA drive –wemeasured it at 519MB/s
–but awritespeed of 346MB/s is poor.For
£900, we don’t think it’s unreasonable to
expect alittle bit more out of storage,whether
it’s alarger SSD or hard disk, or aswitch to
NVMe instead of SATA.The £700 Palicomp
AMD Abyss and PC Specialist Apollo S2
(bothShopper374) use this much faster SSD
platform, so it’s not necessarily out of reach.
It’s telling that of all the hardware
advantages held by the XVI Gamer over the
Gaming XVI Essential, the most meaningful
