PCSpecialist Gladius R9 System Review

Conclusion

Thinking back across a couple of the major gaming moments in years past we recall John Romero promising, in the Daikatana advertising, that he’s gonna make us his bitch. Next up in the arrogant advertising chronology comes Crysis, which promised that no matter what system you owned, it couldn’t run it. The game was going to make your system it’s bitch. What’s this to do with the PCSpecialist Gladius R9 you ask? It’s simple. The tables are turned. This system makes any game it’s bitch. You can hear the games squealing like a pig that their settings only go so high, and they’re sorry that they don’t go high enough to cause the Gladius R9 to break into a sweat. The Gladius R9, if you’ll forgive a bit of anthropomorphising, just laughs at how easily it chews through polygons and shaders without dropping the frame rate. Oh you want Ray Tracing, DLSS, multi-stage supersampling? No worries. 

In a lot of ways it is so impressive that we can’t help but chuckle. It wasn’t that long ago that we reviewed the PCS Myrmidon I, a system with the highest Core i9 and the current Nvidia champion GPU – if we forget the Titan. This Gladius R9 makes that seem like a wheezy old crate. Let there be no confusing, the i9-10900K and RTX 2080Ti combo of the Myrmidon I still smoke most games, but the Gladius R9 with 16 Ryzen 9 3950X cores and the very latest Nvidia Ampere RTX 3090 smokes them in a whole different way. If the Myrmidon smokes games like a cuban cigar, the Gladius R9 smokes them like an oil-field fire. It’s another big step above something that felt like it was already so high there wasn’t anywhere further to go.

So it’s powerful. Every piece of the configuration is designed to chew through whatever you ask of it, from rendering, video encoding, gaming at insane resolutions and image quality settings, it handles them with aplomb. If you spend a serious wedge on the best components available you will end up with a powerful system, so in many ways it isn’t a shock. It’s the fine details that, as always, set PCSpecialist build and design team apart.

There are many companies that offer high end systems, some of which break into the five figure bracket, and whilst we’re never going to pretend that the Gladius R9 is a system for all but the most well-heeled buyer, relatively the price is affordable for what you’re getting. There has been no inclusion of pointless, budget hiking, items. The 240mm Corsair H100i AIO does a fine job of keeping the Ryzen 9 3950X cool. No need for a custom watercooling loop and its associated costs. Equally the ASUS TUF RTX 3090 is an air-cooled card, but the RTX 3090 is so efficient, and so rarely stressed, that it ran cool and quiet throughout our time with the Gladius R9. You aren’t lacking in the lighting department either, with RGB Corsair LL fans throughout and even the 32GB Dominator RAM is RGB. The build quality is one of the areas of the PCSpecialist systems we’ve reviewed that is constantly impressive whether you’re buying a supreme value system or one at this end of their range.

Attention to detail is indicative of the care PCSpecialist takes, from packaging so carefully even the most ham-fisted courier can’t damage your system, through the careful part selection which brings stupifying performance within the realms of the average person, even down to the cable management which is always done at a level most people couldn’t be bothered with for their own system, let alone the time it must take given the numbers PCS build a day. All of which bodes well for any future support inquiries. 

We only have three minor quibbles. And they’re very minor. First we’d prefer a 360mm AIO just to give us a little more thermal headroom. Secondly an exhaust fan wouldn’t go amiss, although the internals never get hot. Lastly the Bulldog software PCS always install is an intefering pain in the backside and we’d uninstall it the first chance we got. Otherwise, there is nothing to complain about at all.

It’s impossible to spend any time with the Gladius R9 and not come away with your jaw on the floor, such is its endless capability. For those of us with daily systems based upon hardware a few gens old it’s almost depressing how far the goalposts have moved forwards. Brutally capable, always cool and quiet, and has that RGB glitz that wows you when you first hit the power button. Epic. 

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