PCSpecialist Titan Exige Review

Conclusion

Whenever we’re comparing systems here at OC3D it has to be taken into account the wildly differing price points of each setup. It’s not a comparison in the strictest sense, but rather to demonstrate what kind of performance you can achieve from this system and how that performance scales with the budget you have to spend.

As anyone who has to work to tight purse-string limits will know, there is a temptation to spend a little extra to get a little more performance, or if you’ve always lived under harsh restrictions to doubt that spending the extra brings any genuine rewards. Naturally there are areas you can save money without necessarily compromising your performance, and areas where spending any amount more reaps huge rewards. We’ve always said that, all things being equal, spending more on your GPU will bring you the most obvious performance benefits. It’s probably, assuming no glaring weaknesses, GPU > CPU > OS Drive > Memory > Motherboard. Sure if you’ve got a 8 core CPU but a HDD OS drive then that changes, but as our many Z690 reviews show, any motherboard will get you to the dance. In fact the motherboard is probably the one and only area that PCS have considered the cost/feature benefits of spending more and instead gone with a good middle option in the form of the ASUS ROG Strix Z690-F. It has everything you need and nothing you don’t and also keeps the price tag well below £3K. About the only other concession to sanity is the Seagate Barracuda HDD data drive that might require some storage juggling if you have a massive Steam library.

Beyond those two though the PCSpecialist Titan Exige is an exercise in bringing flagship components together and letting them be as good as they are. The Intel Core i9-12900K is a spectacular processor and a return to form for Intel after the 11th Gen misstep. It’s fast in every scenario from rendering to gaming. It can be hot under heavy loading – rendering for example – but in general use has enough horsepower available that it never needs to run flat out and therefore hot. The Corsair H150i Elite Capellix is staggeringly good. It’s my first experience of this particular AIO and it’s at least half as loud as the Cooler Master model I run, but just as capable of taming the temperatures. All the Corsair component choices in the Titan Exige are good to be honest. The MP400 might not be the fastest M.2 in the world but it’s no slouch. The iCUE 5000X case is big enough and flashy enough to look great on your desk, but also has enough room and mounting points to keep the inside of your case cool and neat. PCS always do a spectacular job in cable management and system building and the Titan Exige is no exception. The 5200 MHz DDR5 Dominator Platinum kit also has lovely lighting and runs like a train.

The star of the show though is the RTX 3080 Ti. That’s probably the least controversial opinion you can have, but we make no apologies for it. The new AMD cards are great but they haven’t dialed in the Ray-Tracing yet, whereas the Ampere Nvidia cards do everything well with the RTX 3080 Ti being the best of the bunch without eating another £500 of your budget with the 3090. CUDA cores handle rendering with aplomb, it has enough memory and performance to run at high resolutions without a problem. If you stick Ray-Tracing and DLSS on with everything up to the stops it just shrugs it off and delivers ultra-smooth gaming. It’s a monster.

The PCSpecialist Titan Exige encapsulates all that is great about their approach to system building. Just because this is more expensive than many we’ve looked at recently doesn’t mean they’ve just sorted by highest price and put in a case. The component choice is just as wise and carefully considered as it is on their more affordable towers. It’s just that with this model the end result is a system that annihilates everything in front of it and begs for more. The combination of Core i9 CPU and RTX 3080 Ti is every bit as powerful as you hoped, and the PCS build quality is a joy to admire. The Titan Exige easily wins our OC3D Enthusiast Award.

  

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