PCSpecialist Amethyst Elite Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
There is a reassurance to a PCSpecialist system arriving in the office that is difficult to explain unless you’ve lived it. As you must know we see an extraordinary amount of hardware come through OC3D Towers. Just on the law of averages, or regression to the mean, or simple statistics, we see things that don’t always work out of the box. You can’t review as much hardware as we do and that not be the case. So when a PCSpecialist system arrives we know for sure that it will work. But that isn’t all that gives us a sense of calm.
Firstly the packaging is always spot on. The combination of using the PC Case box and packaging, plus their own packaging, and the Instapak foam insert means the systems always turn up in mint condition. There is never a chance that a particularly surly courier could damage it. Secondly by including all the accessories, screws, manuals and unused cables you know that in the future if you wanted an upgrade it’s no difficulty in adding things to your rig. For us as reviewers the financial side doesn’t affect us per se, but we also always have confidence that the rig will be all it can be, at a price that is scarcely believable. PCSpecialist have forced everyone else who builds systems to not put the high-margin hardware in for the sake of their profit margin, because they never do.
Once you have it out of the box and have dispensed with the protective packaging you get to bask in the build quality. From their most affordable models to the ones that we mortals can only dream about, every PCSpecialist system has the same care lavished over the cable management. You don’t ever feel that your lack of funds has cost you in performance terms.
Performance
Speaking of performance the Amethyst Elite is a barnstorming system for the money. The B650 motherboard is all the motherboard you actually need. It has plenty of connectivity options, and easily enough power to push the Ryzen 7 7800X3D along happily. That processor is the perfect balance between gaming ability and all-round capability too. With 8 cores and 16 threads it eats rendering tasks, but the 3D V-Cache also brings a boost to gaming performance. Feed the 32GB of Corsair 6000MHz DDR5 with data from the very fast Samsung 990 drive and it is a recipe for smoothness.
Of course the star is the Radeon RX 7900 GRE. It might not be the fastest graphics card in the world, but it’s incredibly capable considering its price. It’s certainly worthy of a place in the AMD RX 7900 range, even if it’s below their XT and XTX cards. It runs anything at 1440P, and, as you saw, happily runs at 4K too with some judicious setting choices. We’d be tempted to just turn ray-tracing off and ramp everything else up to the stops.
Lastly the case choice deserves a mention. So many cases are targeted at gamers, with flashy lights and modernist touches. The Fractal North uses wood, Walnut on this model, to make the PCSpecialist Amethyst Elite look at right in any home. It’s a mature choice, backed by the lack of internal RGB lighting. Naturally being a PCS rig you can customise it to your taste if you want something a little more glitzy. With blazing performance and fantastic build quality the PCSpecialist Amethyst Elite is a fantastic choice for gaming without breaking the bank and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.
Price £1599.99 as reviewed.
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