PC Specialist Apollo T1 System Review

Conclusion

Whenever we’re asked, as we often are, what we advise when it comes to system specification we regularly tell people that you have to have an SSD of some description as your OS drive, and then put all your budget into the graphics card. Without question graphics are the one area where any extra investment pays you back greatly. The difference between a Threadripper 2990WX and a Ryzen 3 2300X is huge in rendering but in gaming the massive outlay doesn’t pay you back in the same way as if you’d have used that £1500 price difference on GPUs.

If you’re on an extremely tight budget but still want to get your game on, then spending the majority of your budget on the GPU part reaps the largest rewards and there is no doubt at all that the GTX 1660Ti is a great choice. Okay it doesn’t have the Tensor and RT cores of the RTX 2060, but that’s another £100 on the budget and as we’ve said when you’re at this end of the price spectrum an extra tenner can be difficult to find. Of course PC Specialist are flexible enough that we’re sure if you did have the necessary funding you could grab this system with a 2060 instead. However, you’re not going to be disappointed at what the GTX 1660Ti has to offer and our gaming benchmarks bore that out. If you’re looking at them and feeling slightly sad that it generally only just breaks 60 FPS average, remember we always test with every setting as high as possible, and even a small tweak to the anti-aliasing would greatly increase the frame rate you can achieve, as was demonstrated in the 40 FPS gains we saw in Unigine.

Although the case and motherboard might not win any awards for supreme feature levels they also aren’t totally lacking in the bits we use in the real world. Yes it’s nice to have things that look great on a specification sheet, but how much of your motherboard do you really use? How often do you rejig the internals of your case? So why not save the money and spend it on something that you will make the most of, in this case a decent processor and a fast GPU. The Ryzen 3 2300X is a good cost effective option, more than sufficient for light desktop stuff and gaming, with enough performance to let you do video conversion with a bit of patience. With the addition of the ADATA SSD you can be sure that you’re not stuck hanging around whilst some sluggish mechanical drive attempts to keep your operating system running in the background, or streaming textures to your game.

One thing we’ve come to expect from PC Specialist is high build quality and a very carefully selected set of components, and the Apollo T1 doesn’t disappoint. It’s exactly as much system as you need to achieve 60 FPS in nearly every title, without compromising anything to achieve that sub-£700 price tag, nor is it thrown together with little care just because you haven’t paid a fortune for it. If you’re a gamer on a budget it’s outstanding value for money and when you’re deep in your game the minor things like a lack of RGB lighting wont even cross your mind.

  

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