PC Specialist Vortex 440 System Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing 

As configured for this review the PC Specialist Vortex 440 holds a price-tag of £1599 shipped here in the UK. Broken down into its component parts the PC Specialist Vortex 440 would cost the following to build yourself:

• £295 – Intel Core i7 5820K
• £200 – ASUS X99-S
• £440 – Nvidia 4GB GTX 980
• £265 – Kingston HyperX Predator 3000MHz 16GB DDR4
• £95 – Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB SSD
• £55 – Toshiba 2TB 7200RPM HDD
• £80 – Corsair H100i
• £105 – Corsair RM850
• £90 – NZXT H440 Red/Black
• £70 – Windows 8.1 64 Bit

All of the above prices are taken from a variety of retail sites and provide a rough guideline to the price it would cost to buy these components yourself. The sum of the individual component retail prices is £1695 meaning PC Specialist’s £1600 price is £95 cheaper than a self-build. If you factor in that these parts come pre-built into a functioning system (which in itself saves hours of your time), are delivered to your door and provided with warranty and service support – it’s hard to argue at all.

Overview

So far in this review there have been only a few negative things I’ve brought up. The first is that the choice of NZXT’s black and red H440 case when using the black and white ASUS X99-S is strange, especially considering NZXT make a black and white H440. However, speaking with PC Specalist they did remind us that consumers can configure the system with a different colour case (such as a white NZXT Phantom 240/410 or Corsair 600T) or they can even configure the system with a red motherboard to match the current case (such as a Gigabyte’s X99 Gaming 5). So if the colour scheme is important to you, you can easily fix this with a few clicks in the system configurator – which is a fair resolution to this issue. Although, the black and white H440 is sadly not an option at this time. The second is that the noise of this system is excessive, and in my opinion offensive at load. Again, this doesn’t seem to be a problem as PC Specialist have told us that they will revise the default fan profile of this system in light of this feedback. End-users should expect a much quieter system and given how solid the temperatures were already we don’t expect system performance will be impacted at all.

There are two more important things I need to mention. The first of those is that our review system was not stable. Under particular applications it would crash, we had one crash in Prime95, one in CPU-Z and one in Cinebench: I was only testing this system for around 4-5 hours. If it crashes 3 times in 4-5 hours then in my books that isn’t stable and if I was a customer I’d be very unhappy indeed. Given the nature of the blue screens, and after speaking with PC Specialist, we can now confirm that it’s actually a problem with the way the X99 motherboards and CPUs interact with 3000MHz DDR4 memory. PC Specialist have told us they are currently working with the relevant hardware partners to resolve this memory issue. In the meantime I would strongly recommend that consumers avoid the 3000MHz DDR4 option, and take the small step down to 2800MHz, until a resolution is presented.  A final, seemingly minor issue, that the mechanical hard disk drive was uninitialised and unformatted meaning it didn’t show up in Windows. To me and to a lot of savvy users, that is an easy fix but to the type of user who might buy a pre-built system this might not be so easy to fix. It is my understanding that the review systems go through a different validation process to consumer purchased systems so this problem is negligible. For a consumer-bought system this would have been picked up during the consumer burn-in and validation process that retail PC Specialist systems undergo.

In light of PC Specialist’s feedback to my concerns I am happy to recommend the system since the only issue that remains unresolved, the DDR4 3000MHz memory instability, is not something attributable to PC Specialist. Considering the hardware at hand here the value for money is startling, it works out cheaper to buy this system than to build it yourself. I do have to give PC Specialist credit where credit is due: this system looks stunning, has an excellent selection of components inside it and is built INCREDIBLY well. Yes, the capitalisation is needed. The cable management has blown my mind, I wouldn’t be surprised if PC Specialist told me this system was built by robots. PC Specialist are also well clued up in how to get the product to you in a flawless condition and make sure all of the relevant instructions and documentations are included to improve the user experience. On the whole the PC Specialist Vortex 440 comes highly recommended, although we want to stress the caveat with 3000MHz DDR4 memory – pick 2800MHz or less.

Pros

• Excellent cable management
• Great component selection
• Impressive value for money considering the components used
• Attention to detail on presentation and packaging

Cons

• X99 problems with 3000MHz DDR4 memory, users should select 2800MHz memory or lower to avoid
• White and Red colour mis-match may bug the picky user but this can be fixed by choosing a different case or motherboard in the system configuration
• Excessive noise at idle and load (Fix implemented)

“The Vortex 440 is a true winner of a system; offering great value for money, epic all-round performance and superior build quality.”

Thanks to PC Specialist for providing this review sample.