PCSpecialist Quartz Elite R Review

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As always with a PCSpecialist system you get all the necessary manuals and cables left over from the build. It’s perfect for ensuring you’re available to upgrade down the road without having to try and source a SATA power cable or what have you.

  

After the somewhat basic case the Lunar Spark had, the Quartz Elite R comes in a very nice Prism-X case that’s a good size and, as you’ll see on the next page, does all the flashing lights that are so popular. It’s a significant step up from the Lunar Spark case.

  

We’ll look at the back in more detail on the next page, but you can see that this has an exhaust fan, a decent number of USB connections on the back as well as the WiFi antennae.

  

All PCSpecialist systems have this foam packaging to keep everything in place during transit. It speaks volumes that in all the years I’ve been reviewing their products I’ve never had a single one arrive in anything but pristine quality and instant working.

  

It’s very easy to remove the foam insert and doing so reveals what a massive step forwards the Quartz Elite R is when compared to its more affordable Lunar Spark cousin. Whereas the Spark was the least you could spend to get a good gaming rig, this is much more of a well-rounded product with better cooling all around, along with a beefier CPU and better storage options.

  

CPU cooling is provided by the PCS FrostFlow 240 RGB AIO with both an RGB pump and fans. This sits on top of the star of the show, the Ryzen 7 5800X, an 8 core processor which happily pushes all 16 threads at 4.8 GHz and will never leave you wanting for performance in all but the most extreme rendering scenarios.

  

The white Zotac RTX 3060 is familiar as its the same GPU we had in the PCS Lunar Spark, albeit on AMD hardware and with a more serious CPU behind it. We look forwards to seeing how this affects gaming performance, especially as we’re already big fans of the Core i5-11400 that the Lunar Spark had. Below the GPU you can see the Intel 670P M.2, a 512GB 3GB/s NVMe option that’s a massive increase on the Lunar Spark SSD. We know we mention that a lot, but given that this is only £300 more it shows what a slight flex in your budget can bring.