Fierce PC Witch Doctor GTX 1070 Water Cooled Gaming PC Review

Fierce PC Witch Doctor With one of the coolest names in the business, we expect the gaming PC's from Fierce PC to be pretty special. The last system we reviewed certainly was special, when it came equipped with the mighty GTX 1080 Ti and Ryzen 1700 that set some impressive benchmarks. Now we're back with their latest system called The Witch Doctor. If that name doesn't inspire confidence in this being cool, nothing will. So what's so special about this system? For starters, it comes with a heavily overclocked Intel Core i5 7600K. To hit the higher clocks and keep things cool, there's a custom loop water cooling setup and 120mm radiator. This also comes with Mayhems pastel white coolant, which ensures it's going to look super slick. Moving on, you'll find a GTX 1070 and Z270F motherboard from ASUS. Finally, fast storage, DDR4 memory and more. Specification FREE - BullGuard Internet Security 100Mb, 3 Users, 1 Year GameMax Draco RGB Black Midi Case With Red Shaman HD Armour Intel Core i5 7600K Quad Core CPU Overclock as high as it will go - (4.8GHz stable in this instance) Custom Watercooling Loop - CPU (Black Ice 120mm Rad) Mayhems Pastel White Fluid ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 8GB ROG Strix Graphics Card ASUS ROG STRIX Z270F GAMING Motherboard 16GB ADATA XPG Z1 3000MHz DDR4 Black Memory (2 x 8GB) 512GB Western Digital WD Black M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive 2TB Seagate FireCuda Solid State Hybrid Drive - 5x faster than HDD Game Max GM600G 600w 80 Plus Platinum Modular Power Supply Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64 Bit 5 Year Prestige Protect Warranty (Return to Base - 2 Year Parts, 5 Year Labour, Carriage Free for first 6 months) Price: £1579.95 including VAT and UK mainland delivery Why The Witch Doctor? Ever the creative types, Fierce PC are using the latest Game Max Draco RGB chassis. The big twist here is that it's been treated with what Fierce PC call HD Armour. There are other variants available, such as Shaman, and Gobbler, but we have the Witch Doctor decal on ours. This goes behind the tempered glass front panel, allowing for a freaking sweet custom design on the front panel. We'll take a closer look at that shortly. What Fierce PC Says We know that serious gamers need serious gear, so that's why we've put together this PC using tested, quality high-end components in order to give you the best performance possible, at our best prices. The Witch Doctor is one of our highest power specified gaming PCs, and thanks to the power of the new chips you'll have silky smooth, immersive game-play. This system is powered by the Intel Core i5 7600K Quad-Core CPU overclocked to as high as it will go on all cores, as well as the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Graphics Card and 16GB of 3000MHz DDR4 memory. Your CPU will be fully stress tested and stability tested to ensure your overclock doesn't let you down. Cooling is provided by the stellar, yet simple custom loop built into the PC - featuring a 30mm thick 120mm radiator and opaque white fluid, it'll pick up the colours of the RGB fans and give a great look to your PC. Storage comes in the shape of a 512GB M.2 Solid State Drive to increase the speed, durability and efficiency of your system for years to come. Boot up in seconds and fly through the most demanding applications. Alongside a 2TB Seagate FireCuda Solid State Hybrid Drive with up to 5x faster speeds than any ordinary HDD for a vast amount of file storage. A unique, glossy-finish front panel design, our new Witch Doctor HD Armour customised panels will make your PC stand out from the rest and give your case that personal touch. The Tempered glass case is harder and more impact resistant than normal glass and very stylish and classy, moreover, it's better than aluminium and plastic panels at containing noise. Equipped with vivid, customizable RGB LED lights, enabling further personalization for your build. Includes 1 Year of BullGuard Internet Security, and the latest version of Microsoft Windows 10 Home pre-installed with drivers. A Closer Look My jaw was on the floor from the moment I unboxed this system. I hadn't actually seen it before it arrived, not even in pictures. The front panel decor is really something, and adding unique features like this is something that's going to appeal to a lot of Fierce PC's customers. There are other designs available too, or you can opt to keep the panel stock. The chassis is the Gamemax Draco, which comes fitted out with RGB fans in the front and back, tempered glass on the front and left side, and a PSU shroud. Overall, it's a great looking chassis. There's a solid black panel on the right side, nothing too fancy, but it's functional. I/O is decent enough, with 2 x USB 3.0, HD audio, and power controls up front. Take off the side panel! Right, now that we're able to see inside, you can tell a lot of love and care has gone into the build. Cable routing is perfect, with virtually no excess cable trail on show. What cables you can see are wrapped tight, braided, and even have cable combs on them to keep them looking tidy. The ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 8GB is a very powerful graphics card, and for those gaming at 60+ frame rates, or 1440p it'll be more than up to the job. It's a pretty reliable card for 4K and VR gaming too if required. Water Cooled CPU The custom cooling loop is pre-built and pre-installed. It comes filled with a Mayhems fluid of your choosing, and Fierce PC has a nice range of pick from on their website. It's all hooked up through a nice reservoir/pump to a 120mm radiator on the front. Of course, by taking cool air from the front of the chassis, you'll get much better cooling performance. The block looks great too, with a clear top so you can see the liquid flow. It's all a nice match up for the STRIX X270 motherboard too. It's a blend of black, white and silver that compliments the other components very well. Tucked away on the motherboard, you'll find a WD Black 512GB M.2 NMVe SSD. That's going to mean blazing fast loading times for your OS and games. There's also a 2TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD tucked into the base of the chassis for your mass storage needs too. Cable Combs To keep the build looking neat and tidy, Fierce PC use cable comes on the bigger cables. The end result speaks for its self, and just gives the build that extra polish. RGB Lighting When it comes to lighting, there's not much to be said that can't be seen. The GPU and motherboard feature built-in RGB lighting which can easily be customised to your liking. The chassis uses a single RGB fan in the rear and three more in the front panel. All fans are 120mm models. However, they also come with a remote control, allowing you to tweak the colours and effects, or even turn them off entirely. Testing & Methodology To test each system or notebook, we want to stress every component of the system to check stability and performance, giving us an idea as to why those particular components were picked for this particular system. We use a wide variety of applications to gain a broad spectrum of results for comparing diverse aspects of system performance. Games Used All games are tested at both 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 2160 x 3840 (4K). Please note that for systems which do not support a particular resolution, such as 1080p laptops, we will not test the higher resolutions on those devices. Rise of the Tomb Raider (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Pure Hair Off Deus Ex (Steam) DX12 Medium Preset Ghost Recon: Wildlands (Uplay) Medium Preset Turf Effects Off Far Cry Primal (Uplay) Normal Preset Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download) FireStrike (1080p) Benchmark Unigine Superposition (download) 1080p Extreme Benchmark PCMark 10 Professional (download) Express Benchmark WPrime (download) 32M and 1024M CineBench R15 (download) CPU Multi CPU Single Handbrake (download) Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below) AIDA64 Engineer (download) CPU-Z (download) HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the "normal" profile. Synthetic Benchmarks 3DMark Firestrike With that heavily overclocked and water cooled CPU, combined with a powerful GPU, the Witch Doctor made easy work 3DMark Firestrike. 15474 is a great score for any system. Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme Shifting the workload to something more GPU intensive, the GTX 1070 fared very well, setting a respectable score of 3622. PCMark 10 Multitasking and day to day workloads such as office work, Skype calls, editing images and more are important for PC users. Of course, the Witch Doctor made easy work of this test too. WPrime 32M and 1024M Another good result here, with the i5 CPU clocking a decent time. It's only a quad-core, and obviously, some of the other systems with i7 CPUs performed a little better, but that's to be expected. Cinebench R15 The Witch Doctor didn't fair too well in Cinebench, where the i7 CPUs that have HT faired better. Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K Handbrake performance was decent enough, it could be better, but again this isn't a CPU built for rendering, it's built for gaming. Storage Write The M.2 drive isn't the fastest, but it's no slouch either. It'll certainly deliver fast loading times and it strikes a nice balance between price and performance for this system. Read Gaming Performance Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Now we get onto the really good stuff. This is a gaming system, so it makes sense that this is where it would excel. In Deus Ex, it dominates at both 1080p and 1440p. 4K gaming did drop to around 30fps, it's doable, but I think you'll want a faster GPU to get this game running faster. Rise of the Tomb Raider Tomb Raider is easy work for the Witch Doctor, with frame rates very much in excess of 60 in all three benchmarks! Ghost Recon: Wildlands Fantastic scores here too, and while it didn't hit 60fps at 4K, it's certainly more than playable. You could easily tweak the settings to get 4K performance a bit smoother. Far Cry Primal 1080p and 1440p performance is flawless yet again. 4K performance just broke past that glorious barrier too at 61fps. Overall, this promised to be a gaming system, and it certainly delivered on that promise. Power Consumption and Temperatures Temperatures Having such a compact notebook often means having a lot more heat build up. However, at just 77c at full load, it shows that Aorus has really invested in some great cooling here. It's easily the coolest notebook we've tested so far. CPU GPU GPU temperatures are pretty fantastic too, the GPU even runs cooler than the Samurai, which is definitely reassuring. Acoustics The cooling performance is fantastic, but it's certainly no louder than the other notebooks we've tested. In fact, they're all about the same. Final Thoughts Pricing Fierce PC has provided us with a fantastic gaming PC for review. It's available now from them in this exact specification for £1579.95, including VAT and UK mainland delivery. That's pretty competitive with other system builders out there, and the price is reflected by the fantastic gaming performance. You can easily reduce the ticket price with a few tweaks if needed. If you choose a more affordable chassis and opt out of the HD Armour options, for example, you can get the price closer to £1500. Price: £1579.95 including VAT and UK mainland delivery How Much to Built it Myself? FREE - BullGuard Internet Security 100Mb, 3 Users, 1 Year 0 - £14.75 GameMax Draco RGB Black Midi Case - £73.99 Intel Core i5 7600K Quad Core CPU - £215.36 Custom Watercooling Loop - £185 ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 8GB ROG Strix Graphics Card - £504.95 ASUS ROG STRIX Z270F GAMING Motherboard - £161.44 16GB ADATA XPG Z1 3000MHz DDR4 Black Memory (2 x 8GB) - £171.55 512GB Western Digital WD Black M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive - £179.97 2TB Seagate FireCuda Solid State Hybrid Drive - 5x faster than HDD - £84.95 Game Max GM600G 600w 80 Plus Platinum Modular Power Supply - £49.99 Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - £99.98 Self Built Total = Approximately £1741.93 Of course, if you build yourself you're missing out on the 5 Year Prestige Protect Warranty (Return to Base - 2 Year Parts, 5 Year Labour, Carriage Free for first 6 months). You won't get the HD Armour, you won't get the pre-applied overclock, and you'll have the time cost of sourcing the parts and self-building. Of course, if you swap for an AIO cooler, ditched the second HDD, and assume you've already got your own OS, you could easily take that down to £1432 for a similar build, but with the quality of this build and warranty, I think you're going to struggle to beat the overall value for money on offer here. Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3T6gKza-00 Overview The biggest win before we even discuss performance is the price. Fierce PC is offering a very well rounded system at an extremely competitive price. When you factor in how clean their overall build is, the choice of components, and the overclocking, it's a steal! Of course, not everyone is going to self-build with a heavily overclocked and custom loop water cooled CPU. However, for under £1600, getting all that is very appealing to any PC gamer who wants the best performance. Gaming Throw any game at this system with ultra settings and you'll have no issues at 1080p or 1440p resolutions. This is also good news for those who game above 60Hz. 4K performance is pretty decent too, and VR performance won't be far off that either, just drop the quality settings a little and you'll be hitting perfectly playable frame rates in no time. Home and Office This is a fast system, no doubt about that. However, the use of a straight up quad-core CPU with no Hyperthreading does feel a little lacking. It's not, but I guess I've been spoilt in the world of core counts recently with the new Skylake-X and Ryzen range of CPUs. While this system does excel at gaming and plows through day-to-day tasks, it doesn't quite have the multitasking edge I'd like. That's not a problem, but those wanting to render videos may want to look at a less gaming orientated CPU, obviously. Build Quality Fierce PC has done a stunning job on this build. From the cable routing to the choice of components, to the HD Armour, it looks and feels superb. The RGB lighting controls are a nice touch and give it that premium gamer vibe too. The use of a chassis that features tempered glass is always welcome, and the matching Gamemax Platinum rated PSU is certainly welcome too. Of course, if you wanted another chassis, there are other options available in their store. Pros Ideal for gaming at 1080/1440 Great for VR Blazing fast OC applied to CPU Custom loop cooling for CPU 4 x RGB fans with controller Tempered glass chassis HD Armour graphics on front panel Exceptional value for money compared to self-build. Fast M.2 and SSHD combo 80 Plus Platinum PSU Very competitive warranty Cons None Neutral Quad-core (not HT) CPU may limit some rendering tasks "The Witch Doctor from Fierce PC is not only one of the coolest looking systems we've ever reviewed, it's also one of the best value high-end gaming PCs on the market today. Highly recommended!"