OC3D @ PCSpecialist – Here’s what we found

OC3D goes behind the scenes at PCSpecialist

Ahead of Christmas, OC3D has been heading up north, and one of our ports of call has been to PCSpecialist in Wakefield. Today, PCSpecialist is one of the largest system integrators in Europe, and their operations have only gotten larger since our last visit.

Every year, PCSpeciaoist sells well over 100,000 computers. Every five minutes, a PCSpecialist PC is delivered. To achieve this, PCSpecialist needs an army of PC builders and one of the largest stores of PC components in Europe.

Currently, PCSpecialist ships systems to over 30 companies in Europe. They have registered branches in France, Italy, and Spain, and a subsidiary in Germany. The company is also ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001 certifications.

Below is a picture of one of PCSpecialist’s setup and testing areas. This is only part of PCSpecialist’s testing space, and all of those PCs will be making their way to customers soon.

PCSpecialist continues to evolve

Over the years, we have seen PCSpecialst evolve to become a PC-building powerhouse. Every year their manufacturing process is refined. The company has also added custom elements to their products, making them unique amongst their peers.

Now, PCSpecialist excels within the liquid-cooled PC market. The company laser etched their laptop keyboard keys to support languages that others do not. The company has also created custom GPU supports for many of its gaming systems, and has customized PCSpecilist case models.

Powering this facility is a 235.5 KWp solar array. With about 187,900kW of power generation annually, this array is enough to power 57 homes. This helps offset PCSpecialist’s HUGE power bill and lowers the carbon emissions of their system-building processes.

Customising PCs at an industrial scale

PCSpecialist’s manufacturing process isn’t a production line. Customers can customise their PCs with specific hardware choices that make their system unique. Users can often select their PC’s case, motherboard, processor, graphics cards, memory configuration, and storage. There is an almost endless number of hardware configurations to choose from.

PCSpecialist’s staff are experts in PC building. They must know how to work with every PC hardware combination and ensure that every PC is built with the correct hardware.

Logistics is critical. PC builders need fast access to components, screws, and tools. Even managing waste materials is a logistical challenge. Thankfully, PCSpecialst has solved these challenges. Over 95% of PCSpecialist’s waste materials are recycled. This includes cardboard, soft plastics, hard plastics, metals, wood, strapping and polystyrene.

An insane number of GPUs

As one of Europe’s largest PC-building companies, PCSpecialist cannot afford to run out of hardware. Hardware is bought in bulk, and their warehouse is filled with more PC components than you can imagine.

The logistics behind PCSpecialist’s PC-building operation are insane. Much of the company’s shelved hardware is already allocated to future orders, orders that are simply waiting to be built.

In their warehouse, we found a huge amount of GPUs from AMD and Intel. We also found motherboards of all form factors and chipsets.

On their shelves this year, we even found a large number of “Back-Connect” motherboards. PCSpecialist is one of the largest producers of pre-built PCs with “Back-Connect” motherboards. These PCs have a cleaner aesthetic thanks to their cleverly placed power connections.

Have you ever seen this many HDDs?

While SSDs are now dominant in the PC market, there is still a lot of demand for hard disk drives. After all, they still offer the most capacity for your money, and not all data needs the fastest possible storage.

PCSpecialist still builds a lot of PCs with HDDs installed. However, it is worth noting that there is less space dedicated to HDDs than there used to be.

Custom PCSpecialist hardware

One hallmark of PCSpecliasit systems is their branding. Today, PCSpecialist are large enough to have custom versions of popular cases. Below, we have a PCSpecialist branded Fractal North case. Note that this system also has another unique PCSpecialist addition: a custom GPU support bracket.

Liquid Cooling Specialists

If you have ever water-cooled a PC, you will know that it takes a lot of time and effort to build such a system. The sheer mass of the coolant inside also makes moving and shipping these systems harder than most standard PCs. Additionally, leak testing these systems is no small task.

We got to see several systems during our visit while they were being stability tested and leak tested. PCSpecialist puts these PCs through a 24-hour leak and pressure test before they are even powered on, and after, they are tweaked, overclocked and stability tested. After Windows and drivers are installed, system stability is tested with a 48-hour burn-in test.

To say the least, these systems are a massive undertaking for PCSpecialist. They require more effort to build, longer testing procedures, and the tedium of manual overclocking. If PCSpecialist wanted an easy job, they wouldn’t build these systems, but PCSpecialist is a company of hardware enthusiasts, and that’s why they produce liquid-cooled systems.

Custom Workstations

While gaming PCs are a common order here, high-end workstations are another speciality of PCSpecialist. Below, we have a high-end system that appears to feature two graphics cards and an AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor.

Multi-GPU configurations aren’t useful for today’s games, but they are useful for workstation applications and AI training. Sadly, we did not get a good look at this system’s specifications sheet. That said, these GPUs do look like MSI RTX 4090 Ventus 3x GPUs. However, I may be mistaken.

One of the joys of PCSpecilist is that they can create custom PCs to suit your needs. Whether it is a laptop, gaming desktop, or liquid-cooled monstrosity, PCSpecialist has you covered.

Sadly, things were busy at PCSpecialist. Christmas is coming, and that means that PCs need to a built and shipped at a rapid pace. For obvious reasons, we took care not to disturb anyone while they were working. After all, we don’t want to be blamed for any late Christmas orders,

If you are getting a PCSpecialist PC this Christmas, it might be being built right now. We might even have a picture of it being tested!

You can join the discussion on our visit to PCSpecialist on the OC3D Forums.