PC Specialist Vanquish Arc Midi Review

Conclusion

Occasionally a product arrives that makes our job extremely simple. The PC Specialist Vanquish Arc Midi is one such item.

There is nothing at all to dislike about it. The choice of components is excellent. At the heart of the system is the i5-4670K which has replaced the i5-2500K as the perfect blend between performance and affordability. Throughout our testing it made a mockery of it’s on-paper performance with good results in hardcore calculation tests and absolutely no deficit to the 4770K in our gaming benchmarks. PC Specialist provide two graphics card choices for the same price, the excellent nVidia GTX770 and the equally good AMD R9 290. Looking through our results it’s clear that the R9 290 is the choice if you don’t have a preference for a particular brand and just want the maximum performance for your money. Both are good choices, but we’d recommend the R9 290 if you want the best possible results.

One of the areas that usually is a corner cut when getting a system at this low price point, RAM and storage are well catered for here. 16GB of 2400MHz Kingston memory is the best you could possibly hope for without annihilating the budget, and the combination of the speedy 3K Kingston 128GB SSD and 1TB 6Gb/s storage drive ensure that all your options are covered. The Maximus VI Hero is a great little motherboard with plenty of features and an excellent BIOS. It looks great too, and these looks blend beautifully with the Fractal Arc Midi R2 case which supplies half the name of this particular configuration. The case has plenty of air-flow and lots of nice touches, including a stealthy all-black look and lots of places to hide cables out of the way.

Speaking of hiding cables, PC Specialist have gone above and beyond with their build quality. It would be all too easy to just cable everything up and forget about it. It would nearly be as easy to try and route the cables so the majority are out of the way. But the Wakefield based company have not only routed the cables well, but tied them up and ensured that, from the front, you’d be hard pressed to find one out of place. The overclock might not be at the leading edge of performance, but with the combination of a good tweak and some low voltage mean that it will remain both cool and quiet and, more importantly, reliable throughout the lifespan of the purchase. Backing up this confidence is the excellent after sales support and warranty.

Pre-built systems, and especially pre-overclocked ones, nearly always come with parts we’d change or things that aren’t quite up to snuff, and the ones that are perfect have an enormous price-tag to balance out the lack of holes in the specification. With the PC Specialist Vanquish Arc Midi we can’t think of anything we’d change about it, Windows 8.1 notwithstanding, and it is built like a tank and with an incredibly low price of £1200. Fantastic value for money and equally great performance mean that it has to be be awarded our OC3D Gold Award.

        

Thanks to PC Specialist for supplying the Vanquish Arc Midi for review. Discuss your thoughts in the OC3D Forums.