Published: March 31, 2025 | Source: PCSpecialist | Price: £1599 | Author: Von Blade

PCSpecialist Zircon Elite R Review

Conclusion

The law of averages dictates that one day a PCSpecialist system will arrive in the office that hasn’t had its components carefully selected and balanced. It hasn’t happened yet, and the Zircon Elite R is no different.

Because AMD spent so long making the Ryzen processors exceptionally good, we had to wait a little while for their GPU arm to catch up. The 7000 series was good in the more powerful formats (7900XTX etc). The launch of the RDNA 4 cards has finally seen both sides of AMD coming to play. Or, perhaps if you prefer, the graphics cards are now finally as desirable as the processors. Clearly when we looked at the other PCS Zircon system, the Ultra R, we saw how much of a success their 9800X3D Ryzen is. There is a reason it’s selling in such vast quantities. The graphics card in that case was a little left behind.

The PCSpecialist Zircon Elite R is actually a better balanced rig. Obviously the Ryzen 5 9600X isn’t as capable as the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but that is balanced by the RX 9070 out-performing the previous generation. As you could see from our testing it’s a pocket powerhouse, able to hit smooth frame rates in the most taxing titles, even at 4K. It’s not really designed for 4K, that’s the RX 9070 XTs place, but if you just turn off ray-tracing, or maybe turn on AFMF – something we didn’t do – you’ll easily run anything you throw at it.

Minor Changes

One of the coolest things about PCSpecialist is how you’re able to tailor it to your preference. In the format of our review specification you’d be happy, and it’s not missing anything. Temperatures are cool, even under harsh loading, and the RGB outshines any aesthetic shortcomings the case might have. If it was our money, we’d probably go for a slightly nicer case to live with day-to-day. The side window on the Prism II is a pain to take on and off, the lack of a front USB Type-C would be annoying to live with given how often we use that particular port. Plus the magnetic dust moves if you so much as look at it funny.

We’d also upgrade the Solidigm drive to a 2TB version. Games are massive these days, and the PCS Zircon Elite R is so good at making them look excellent we’d not want to have to shuffle installs about too often. But those are tiny things, very much of a personal preference. If you don’t use Type-C USB and have a small game library then they cease to be an issue.

Like all that have come before it, the PCSpecialist Zircon Elite R is a fantastic combination of price and performance, and worthy of our OC3D Gamers Choice award.

Configure your own Zircon Elite R here.