PC Specialist ‘Vanquish 230XT’ Gaming System Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

The overall purchase cost of the Vanquish 230XT and its relative performance is one of the most important aspects of the system. As mentioned back at the start of this review, we typically see systems in the region of £1400-1600 being chosen, but dropping the bar down to a slightly lower level doesn’t necessarily mean that you are losing out on a lot of performance. With a price tag of just over £1100 delivered in the UK, PC Specialist’s Vanquish 230XT has a lot of performance on offer for the cost. To sweeten the deal even more, eTeknix readers can order this system for a limited time at an even more astonishing price of £999.00 delivered – that’s a saving of £138.00. To get this offer price, head over to PC Specialist using this link where you can select and buy this well-balanced system (upgrades will incur additional costs).

Overview

When buying a pre-built system, we obviously want to get as much performance as we can for our money and in a few instances ,gamers tend to go over their initial budgets simply to get bragging rights of having a high performance system. The Vanquish 230XT however is a system that carries a more modest price tag and the performance that it has to offer for that price is very good as well. Naturally we don’t have a top end graphics card or processor, but when we come to think about it, does the average gamer even need that high level of performance and will they even notice the difference? The simple answer to this is no. In most scenarios, the end-user will typically have a single 1920 x 1080 monitor hooked up to the GPU and with the strong frame rates that the R9 280X is able to deliver, to be perfectly honest, you’ve got more than enough performance on tap.

When looking at the choice of components, we have said time and time again that with technology the way that it is today, you really don’t have to go to the extreme to get decent performance and this statement cannot be made any clearer than as we have here in this review. Obviously there is going to be one or  two users that will want to have a bit more SSD capacity over the standard 120GB drive or a bit more hard drive storage space, however for the average Joe, 120GB of SSD and 1TB of hard drive space is more than enough to keep you going for a while. The build quality and service is something else that I have to commend PC Specialist on – we do see that every system integrator will put a lot of effort into making a quality system, but the addition of the welcome pack with a PC Specialist branded user manual and all of the information on what to do when things don’t go quite as planned is something that sets this vendor apart in my eyes. You don’t need to pay over the odds to get great customer service.

What’s the disadvantage of this system over some of the more expensive choices I hear you ask – after all there are pro’s and con’s to every system out there. With this system there is going to be a certain plateau of performance the you will get – especially if you want to overclock the processor that little bit more. Having a mainstream board over one built for high performance systems is in some respects a bit of a bottleneck, but what we also have to remember is that most people who buy systems like this are not hardcore enthusiasts – they simply want a system that will work out of the box and they won’t need to touch the back-end to get it going. If people are wanting to overclock it further then they’ll automatically be looking at the upper end of the price scale anyway.

Overall I have to give the Vanquish 230XT a thumbs up, it has impressed me with its strong performance level for the money and with PC Specialist’s renowned customer service coming as a standard addition to any order, you are safe in the knowledge that if something doesn’t go quite as planned you have a highly experienced team of people behind you that will help you every step of the way and have you back in your favourite game in no time at all.

Pros

• Renowned customer support
• Wallet friendly price tag
• Well balanced performance for the cost.
• Three year standard warranty
• Lower running costs
• Plenty of space for future upgrades

Cons

• The graphics card used in some instances may raise the acoustic levels up a shade.

“We all want to get as much performance as we can for our money and this is certainly the case when we look at buying a pre-built system. With cost a huge deciding factor in what we end up having, spending a little bit less and getting a system such as the Vanquish 230XT will give you a more than average level of gaming performance; with the savings free to spend on getting a better monitor and peripheral set to enjoy your games on.”

Thanks to PC Specialist for providing this review sample.