PC Specialist Magma L1 System Review

PC Specialist Magma L1 System Review

Introduction

Throughout our time here at OC3D we have reviewed a significant number of the PC Specialist systems. Every single one has emphasised the values which we think are key to producing any successful pre-built system. Excellent component choice so that you don’t feel you’re paying through the nose for something you don’t want, or that isn’t in keeping with the rest of the setup – a 1500W PSU on a dual-core system for example. A high level of attention to detail regardless of whether you’re buying something the price of a small car or dipping your toes into the world of PC Gaming for the first time. The package always coming with the various doohickeys that you would have owned if you’d brought each component and built it yourself, which helps ensure you have expansion possibilities. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, not only do you get wise hardware choices by default but there are enormous customisation options so that you can maximise your budget and get the exact specification you desire.

Whether it is a model such as the Velocity R1, comfortably the thing I covet the most of recent years, or a more modest setup such as the Apollo T1, you always come away from your time with a PC Specialist system struggling to think of an area it could be improved without busting the budget. Certainly you can improve them, but it is nearly always on the slippery slope of “well if I spend another £20 here and then another £20 on that then…” which quickly escalates until your budget rig is challenging the midrange models in cost. Akin to buying an old beater out of the car classifieds and attempting to get it to Pebble Beach.

Today we’re looking at the Magma L1, a setup that is very similar to a previous PC Specialist system we’ve tested, the Apollo T1. Both are based around the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, but whereas the Apollo T1 had a Ryzen 3 2300X, the advances in the Zen 2 architecture allow the Magma L1 to run with a six core Ryzen 5 3600 for very little increase in price. How does it perform? Read on.

Test Setup

As a good demonstration of the points we were making above, the Magma L1 spreads all of the budget across the best possible component choices. You have a good 1080P GPU, a powerful 4 GHz six core CPU, plenty of memory, a fast storage drive but no unnecessary frippery. It’s as much system as you need.

CPU : AMD Ryzen 5 3600
Motherboard : Gigabyte B450 Aorus Elite
RAM : 16 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2400MHz
GPU : Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
Storage : 512GB ADATA SX6000 Pro M.2 OS Drive and 2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD for data.
PSU : Corsair VS 450W
Cooling : Stock AMD cooler