FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm Gaming PC Review

FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm FiercePC has a very strong reputation within the custom PC building community. As a brand, they place a strong focus on products which are, essentially, some of the best the market has to offer. With this in mind, we take a look at the Imperial Lightstorm. A brand new system design from FiercePC that features a plethora of goodies inside from Thermaltake. We're honestly not joking either. This system is crammed almost top to toe in Thermaltake cooling products. Many of which we have reviewed previous in one capacity or another and have always been impressed with their performance. In addition, it should be noted that thanks to advancements in TT's technology, all of the cooling and lighting effects are fully controllable by Amazon Alexa. Yes, you can tell Alexa to change the colour and it will work! To, therefore, see a system build that is so heavily backed by this technology is interesting. It is, however, just the icing on the cake. With an Intel i7 processor, Nvidia 1080TI and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM, this system is an absolute beast on paper. Better still all of this has been heavily overclocked to give some especially impressive results. Specifications Thermaltake View 71 Black Mid Tower Case With Tempered Glass Panels Thermaltake Riing Plus 12 LED RGB Radiator Fan TT Premium Edition (3 Fan Pack) Intel Core i7 8700K 3.7GHz (4.7GHz Boost) Hex Core CPU 8700K - 5.0GHz Overclock Thermaltake Pacific RL360 Custom Loop Cooling NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Graphics Card 32GB Corsair Vengeance RGB 3000MHz DDR4 Memory (4 x 8GB) 500GB Samsung 970 EVO M.2 NVME Solid State Drive 500GB Samsung 860 Evo Solid State Drive 2TB SATA3 6Gbps Hard Drive ASUS ROG MAXIMUS X HERO Intel Z370 Motherboard with Aura Sync RGB Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB 850W 80 Plus Gold 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) The official FiercePC Product page can be visited by clicking on the link here! What FiercePC Had To Say "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 Imperial Lightstorm is one of our highest power gaming PCs, and thanks to the power of the new Intel Core processors you'll have silky smooth, immersive game-play. Powered by Intel's new Coffee-Lake Core i7 8700K Hex-Core CPU, with a massive 4.8GHz overclock, as well as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB Graphics Card and 16GB of Corsair's finest 3000MHz Vengeance LPX memory. A lightning-fast Samsung 970 EVO provides near-instant boots and loading times, whilst another 860 EVO gives more permanent storage for your games. A 2TB SATA3 6Gbps Hard Drive Drive gives a vast amount of file storage for anything else." - FiercePC Amazon Alexa As we noted above, one of the major unique features of this PC is that is features a large amount of Thermaltake cooling products as well, of course, as their RGB ToughPower Sync Edition PSU. For more information on the power supply specifically, you can check out our review here. One of the main key features that Thermaltake has looked to push with their more recent components is the ability to control them using Alexa. Having tried this out myself on the Imperial Lightstorm, I must say I was impressed at just how strong the functionality of it was. Through simply but highly intuitive commands you can fully regulate the lighting through your Amazon Alexa. Whether you want individual controls, rotations or solid colours. Simple voice commands are remarkably strong. While this isn't the first component/s we've seen look to apply this technology, Thermaltake has, without a doubt, set the standard for where this should be! A Closer Look Overview The system as a whole looks fantastic. With the top, front and both sides having tempered glass covering, a huge portion of the system is clearly visible. This especially makes all that RGB lighting look fantastic. The lighting effects are nice, bright and vivid. The front of the system has 3 nice large intake fans which, when the RGB is running, look absolutely fantastic. These are set behind the tempered glass and, in addition, dust filters which should help keep the system relatively dust free on the inside. A view of the other side of the system again shows the tempered glass. While the 'exterior' side is a little less interesting, there are clearly a lot of components here which are clearly mounted well and compliments the excellent design of the chassis well. A Closer Look A look at the inside of the system clearly shows that this has been exceptionally well built. You are immediately drawn to the fact that there are no rogue cables. This excellent management allows for all of the componants to be nice and clearly visible. When you're packing this much impressive hardware in there, that is definitely a big factor! This system has loads of really nice components on display. These include the EVGA Nvidia 1080TI graphics card, the power supply, and, of course, the cooling system. Cooling System The cooling system is a custom design which has nice clear transparent plastic tubing. The design and components are entirely Thermaltake which, following a nice large chamber, lead to a 360mm radiator. If you recall the design of the front fans, you will also note that this radiator essentially has fans on either side which should massively help the processor handle that hard overclock! The liquid chamber is roughly 6" tall and for this design and chassis, fits in perfectly! Even the pump block is very impressive with some nice Thermaltake branding to the centre. Graphics Card This system has a EVGA Nvidia Geforce 1080TI. At the time of writing, this is one of the most powerful graphics cards available and has also been moderately overclocked to try and squeeze a little more out of it. As you can see in the picture, this has been vertically mounted which not only looks great but should help promote better exhausting. Power Supply The power supply fitted to the system is a Thermaltake Toughpower Grand Series. Running at 850 watts and including RGB lighting effects, this should be perfect for the build! Memory The FiercePC Imperial Storm carried 32GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM. This RAM is RGB sync capable and overlooking the light show, has been moderately overclocked to boost performance. So, that's 32GB of overclocked RAM! Storage This system carried 3 seperate storage devices. It firstly has a 500GB Samsung 970 EVO NVME M.2 SSD. It secondly has a Standard SATA SSD and finally it has a 2TB Sea gate Barracuda (Green) hard drive. In terms of storage capacity, you will not struggle for the lighting pace of NVME, the speed of SATA SSE or the huge capacity of the HDD. As you may have noticed in earlier pictures, the SSD and HDD have been mounted to the exterior side of the chassis. RGB Lighting Effects The RGB lighting is all synced together via 3 hubs fitted to the exterior of the chassis. These are, again, all Thermaltake branded and with the use of the Alexa app, fully voice compatible. It can sometimes be difficult to put into words what RGB lighting effects look like in the 'real-world'. As such, we've compiled a short video below showing the lighting in effect on a cycled pattern. Remember, that via Alexa or the Thermaltake software provided on the system, this can be fully customised to meet all needs! 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 Final Fantasy XV Benchmark Tool (Square Enix) Normal Preset - Nvidia Optimisation Settings Turned Off 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 Starting off with the 3DMark testing, the sheer power of this system combined with the overclock really makes for an impressive result. The FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm jumps straight to the top and by a pretty significant margin. We suspect that we have found a new system that will stay at the top of this leaderboard for quite some time to come! Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme As Unigine is a strong tester of graphics cards, it's no surprise again to see it top of the list. The moderate overclock that has been applied in this instance though just allows it to sneak in there. In terms of graphical performance though, this is clearly a winner! PCMark 10 In terms of multitasking, PCMark is one of the best tests our there. In this regard, the FiercePC ironically find it competing with itself. The difference in score between the two is exceptionally tight. In another test, this might have just crept the extra 27 points to get onto the top spot. It is in 2nd place, but the margins are so, so, slim here! WPrime 32M and 1024M Beginning to sound like a broken record now, in terms of the processing power of the FiercePC though, this again finds itself ever so close to the top of the list. The 32M score is actually the best we've seen whereas the 1024M is just edged out. Cinebench R15 It might have been flirting with the top in the last few tests, but the FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm finds itself on top again in the Cinebench results. This is, again, a close run race, but when you consider the excellent single core score, this is definitely top of the pile and for a very good reason! Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K While some of the tests have been a close run thing so far in terms of being our best performer, similar to the 3DMark test, the Handbrake conversion framerate shows a significant margin. This is, again, surely an indication of the excellent system build and particularly that strong overclock which has been applied. Storage CrystalDiskMark Between the NMVE drive, SSD and HDD, you are not struggling for storage in this regard. In terms of the results, the main stand out is the write speed onto the SSD. It is a little surprising, given that the main drive is a Samsung 970, that this doesn't feature higher on the list in terms of read speeds. Either way though, for either speed or storage capacity, you're not struggling here at all! Read Write Gaming Performance In terms of gaming, this system has a lot of things going for it. Not only does it have some impressive hardware, but nearly every aspect of it has also been overclocked and quite impressively. In addition, the cooling system should help keep everything running exceptionally smoothly. That is, at least, the theory. In terms of practice? The FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm is an absolute monster! As you can see in the tests below, it immediately jumps to the top spot in almost every manner of testing we conduct in games. In terms of 4K performance as well, this is one of the few systems we've seen that can truly pull it off in a decent manner! Although the list is in its very early-doors stage in terms of our testing, the Final Fantasy XV benchmarks clearly show the gulf between this system and others we tested so far. All in all, this is phenomenal! Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Rise of the Tomb Raider Ghost Recon: Wildlands Far Cry Primal Final Fantasy XV Acoustics and Temperatures Temperatures Despite the pretty heavy overclocking going on with this system, the temperatures are remarkably good. That is, of course, in no small part due to the fantastic cooling system here. As you can see though, with an idle temperature of just 26 (and remember, this CPU is overclocked) this is exceptionally impressive. Even when under load the figures are still very good indeed. The GPU is not a part of the cooling system so that in regard the figures are a little more 'normal'. Despite that though, the chassis design and cooling airflow clearly helps keep this running comfortably. CPU GPU Acoustics The FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm, despite all the fans, is remarkably quiet. While the sheer amount of things does push the idle noise levels up a little, when it's working hard you really see that cooling system at its best. As you can see, under full load while the system did get a little louder it is exceptionally quieter than many others we have seen. Admittedly, many of the worse comparatives are laptops, but remember, this system has 9 fans. 12 if you include those on the GPU! As such, to be so quiet is very remarkable indeed! Final Thoughts Pricing The FiercePC Imperial Lightstorm retails for a price in the region of £3,195.95. That is clearly quite a lot of money and we're not going to argue over that point. In terms of the price though, you do have to consider exactly what you're getting here. Not only are you getting a PC that has some of the fastest components currently available, but you're also getting what is perhaps the most impressive and interactive cooling systems ever created. Through the use of an impressive custom loop system and Thermaltake products (including the Amazon Alexa) compatibility, we're not aware of anyone currently offering a system with so much in terms of looks, power and functionality. Overview As an overview, in terms of aesthetics, any enthusiastic gaming PC owner is going to both love and want this. If we overlook the hardware (which is exceptionally powerful) the work that has gone into the styling of this system is clearly very impressive. In addition, don't forget as well that all these components work seamlessly together and internally or externally, this is a fantastic looking system. Performance Given that the FiercePc Imperial Lightstorm is a high-powered overclocked system you would expect some pretty impressive performance figures. As you can clearly see in our testing, this didn't disappoint. It's no exaggeration to say that in terms of pre-built systems we've reviewed, this is the strongest in terms of both practical usage and gaming. Design I absolutely love the design of this system. It is without a doubt one of the best we've seen in terms of both the aesthetics and the actual physical design itself. While RGB lighting does form a major factor in this build, you shouldn't overlook the clever choices made to put this system together as a whole. Overall, it's a looker when the lights are on or off! Why on earth would you want to turn them off though?! Should I Buy One? For the price, I daresay that there are going to be only select few people who can afford such an outlay on a system. In addition, on the surface, the price might make some people baulk. Once you get past the price and start looking at the details though, you begin to understand why this system carried such a price tag. Not only does it have some of the best hardware currently available, but this has also all been overclocked well beyond the standard figures. A factor which is clearly hugely impressive when you look at the benchmark results. In addition, it also has what is perhaps one of the most sophisticated lighting and cooling systems available in a custom PC. Yes, it might carry a price tag, but in terms of what you get, this system is a perfect combination of looks, performance and functionality! Pros Amazing performance at both work and play! Fantastically good to look at with the RGB on or off. Impressive design features including a strong cooling system. Thermaltake provides a great look with an exceptionally strong performance. The most powerful system we have reviewed to date! Impressively quiet for such a heavy duty system. Cons This system is both exceptionally heavy and also a little hard to carry. Neutral Not everyone is going to be able to afford this.