PCSpecialist Rift Elite R Review

Conclusion

We’ve seen many aggressively priced systems from PCSpecialist in recent times, with a variety of success. They’ve all been good, but any time you’re trying to get a price down to a point there are going to be compromises.

Some of the systems we’ve seen needed more cooling, some needed faster storage, some just a more attractive case, but the release of the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT and its incredible value for money has allowed their team to design a system that still rocks up at £1100 but has no weak spots worthy of note.

The LIAN Li 215 is a great case, particularly for the high airflow necessary to keep these components cool. With lots of mesh at the front and two huge RGB fans there is both plentiful airflow and some very attractive lighting. We know how important lighting is to making even an affordable setup look more expensive than its price ticket. The massive cold air being sucked in keeps everything cool and therefore capable of boosting consistently high, which in turn brings performance benefits. PCS have installed an air cooler – their FrostFlow 3 – and it had no difficulty at all keeping the processor cool regardless of what we threw at it.

Speaking of processors we’ve long loved the Ryzen 5 5600X, a processor capable of performance far beyond its low cost. With 6 cores and 12 threads plus a boost clock deeply into the 4 GHz mark it is more than able to run all your games without becoming the limiting factor, yet also has enough horsepower under the hood to encode videos or render 3D models without you needing to go out for the day whilst you wait for it to finish. This is aided by a good amount of memory and a large capacity, fast M.2 storage option to keep things moving along.

The star of the show is, as it was when we first tested it earlier this month, the RX 6600 XT. The latest Radeon cards have really brought the AMD GPU arm of their company up to the standards of their processor section and the RX 6600 XT is an excellent card. It doesn’t matter what game you choose at 1080, you’ll get over 60 FPS average in even the most testing of modern titles. Even at 1440 you don’t need to tweak many settings to continue that smooth gaming experience.

As the person who reviews all of PCSpecialist’s launches it is as if PCS have been iterating affordable gaming systems. There have been fewer and fewer weakpoints in each new one that arrives until, with the Rift Elite R, PCS have built a system with no weak spots at all. Fantastic value for money and excellent build quality make it an unqualified success. Even if you want to adjust a few elements the outstanding configurator on their website will let you tailor it to your own taste. For £1099 the Rift Elite R is just as happy bringing gaming glory to your eyeballs as it is rendering videos to share those glories with the world and wins our OC3D Gamers Choice Award.

  

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