PCSpecialist Torva Pro R Review

Conclusion

Once again, PCSpecialist has delivered a system that has a clear target in mind and absolutely knocks it out of the park. The PCS Torva Pro R is a total star.

Let’s get a few people out of the way first. Do you want to game at 4K120? Do you have more money than Elon Musks ex-wife and only care about upvotes? This is, perhaps, not the system for you. For absolutely everyone else though, you owe it to yourself to take a long hard look at the PCS Torva Pro R and try and figure out what it’s missing. For us, the answer isn’t very much at all. As usual, PCSpecialist has resisted the temptation to build the Torva Pro R around components that sound good to the layman but don’t actually make your system go any quicker, haven’t equipped it with components that are seriously better than all the other components – a Ryzen 3 in a Crosshair VIII for example – just to bump the price up. You get PCIe 4.0, RGB, liquid cooling, high performance and all for under £1600. It’s a beast.

A lot is talked about 4K gaming, usually from companies trying to sell you a new console, new TV, or bigger GPU. The reality is that 1080 is where nearly everyone does their gaming, and even the hardcore mainly have a 1440 display as it’s the price and performance sweet spot. A good 1440 monitor is nowhere near the price of an equivalent 4K one, and the horsepower necessary to run all your titles at maximum detail at this resolution is vastly reduced. When you’ve only got 3.6 million pixels to shift instead of 8 million you can get away with significantly less hardware. Thus if you’re someone who fits in with the rest of us and has bills to pay and food to buy then you want to be able to game, but without spending the next month living on the sofa with a salty partner. The Torva Pro R is aimed at these exact type of budget-conscious enthusiastic gamers and oh boy does it deliver.

Throughout our review, we compared the PCS Torva Pro R to the PCS Topaz Elite. The Topaz used less budget on the CPU – a 6 core Ryzen 5 5600X – but more on the GPU – Radeon RX 6800. The Torva on the other hand is all about a well-rounded experience, and thus slightly cuts the GPU down to the RX 6700 XT, but ups the CPU to the eight-core Ryzen 7 5800X. Even a cursory glance at our results show how much extra oomph the Ryzen 7 has over its Ryzen 5 sibling. The results it’s able to push out are way more than you might expect from just having a couple of extra cores. You might say that you only plan to game, but if you upload those exploits to Youtube, or stream them on the platform of your choice, then having more CPU horsepower behind the scenes leaves more for the game itself, and you have a more enjoyable experience all around. Or in the case of Youtube less time waiting for things to render. The Ryzen 7 5800X is a beast and we love it.

Gaming wise we were fortunate to have the best of the RX 6700 XT GPUs in our review system, the XFX Merc 319. We know you can’t be guaranteed to receive this particular card, such are the vagaries of stock and such, but if you do then oh boy it’s a screamer. It looks gorgeous, goes like a stabbed rat and is cooler than the Fonz. We tested with the adjustable BAR both on and off, and whilst the difference in performance isn’t exactly stark there is still a tiny bit at the top end extra with BAR on, and zero consequences for doing so, so we’d recommend the first thing you do when powering on the Torva Pro R is to go into the BIOS and click the button that enables it. That’s all you have to do and it can help get you up and over. Who doesn’t enjoy some free performance?

With the Torva Pro R you get fully playable, fully detailed, 1440P Borderlands 3, Godfall and even Cyberpunk 2077, and that’s enough to ensure the Torva can deal with any games you care to throw at it. When you add that to the mind-blowing low price tag of just £1599 in review specification and the usual classy build and warranty from PCSpecialist it’s the perfect gaming PC. Nothing you don’t need, all that you do.

  

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