PCSpecialist Nebula Star Review
Conclusion
Conclusion
This is impressive. We saw on Monday how good the new Intel Ultra Plus processors are (see our review here). But we’re still aware that new processors aren’t cheap. RAM is currently so expensive that selling a kidney might not be enough to cover the cost anymore. Combine those two things, and the chance of getting a great-looking, great-performing gaming rig at this kind of price feels like a thing from the past. Obviously, PCSpecialist disagree.
The Nebula Star is the latest in a lengthy range of attractively priced systems from Wakefield’s finest. You might need to whisper it, but we think it has the potential to be the most impressive one yet. The decision to go with a much flashier case was a stroke of genius. Obviously, at this price point, you don’t expect glitzy systems. We always argue that you’re looking at the screen, not the system anyway. But we’re not so blind as to be ignorant of aesthetic considerations. Utilising a full-panorama glass case lends the PCSpecialist Nebula Star serious impact on your desk.
Performance is still king though. The Ultra 5 250K Plus was massively impressive in our testing on our own rig, and remains so here. Intel has pretty much taken the Ultra 200 265K and moved it down a price segment while increasing performance. It’s hugely impressive. Add to that their Intel Binary Optimisation Tool, which can improve gaming in specific titles, and it’s a lot of processor for the money. The benefits of the Zotac RTX 5060 Ti have often been written about, not least by ourselves, and it remains a card capable of impressive gaming feats. It’s a 1440P card that can do 4K with only minor settings tweaks, or give you huge frame rates at 1080 for those high-twitch games.
Tiny Negatives
One is that the cooler is the bare minimum if you plan to get creative. In gaming, it’s fine, but the moment any load is put on – shader compiling, video encoding etc – the temperatures sky-rocket. We’d say if you plan to get creative at least 40% of the time then an AIO is worth the small cost increase. For noise reasons, if nothing else. As you saw from our results, the Ultra 5 250K ran slower here than on our, admittedly much pricier, test rig. Purely because ours was cooler, so could turbo boost harder for longer. Most games will be okay, but if you love Civilization or Paradox titles, we’d utilise the amazing PCSpecialist configuration to grab a beefier cooling option.
The second is that a 1TB drive is the bare minimum these days, particularly given the size of AAA titles. It doesn’t take long, or many Steam sales, to get a library that far outstrips that capacity. Even if we ignore the possibility of using Nvidia’s Shadowplay to record your gaming exploits. Something to be aware of. If it were our money, we’d upgrade the cooler first, since that yields rewards on every clock cycle.
Final Thoughts
With the insane prices in some areas of current computer hardware, and the demands of the latest technologies, it’s hugely impressive that PCSpecialist have brought the Nebula Star to market with such a meaty specification at such an affordable price point, and easily wins our OC3D Gamers Choice.
£1349 in Review Specification.
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