Monday 21 September 2015

Overclockers Titan Riptide

Overclockers Titan Riptide

Eschewing Skylake in favour of Haswell-E, Overclockers’ Titan Riptide is designed to bridge the gap between games and high-end work applications, and without breaking the bank. The Riptide’s work credentials come from the Core i7-5820K, which is the most affordable part from this CPU range, but it still has six Hyper-Threaded cores and a 3.5GHz stock frequency. The former means multi-threaded applications will run quicker than with any current quad-core chip, and Overclockers has also raised the clock speed to 4.2GHz, so it will be fine with single-threaded software and games too.


Meanwhile, the use of Intel’s X99 chipset means that the Titan Riptide sports quad-channel DDR4 memory – in this case, a 16GB 2400MHz kit. That isn’t the only benefit of the X99 chipset though – it also supports loads of SATA and USB 3 connections, as well as PCI-E M.2 storage. The only slight downer to the i7-5820K is that it only provides 28 PCI-E 3 lanes, rather than the 40 on offer with more expensive Haswell-E chips, but that will only be an issue if you plan to install more than two graphics cards.

All this kit is plugged into an MSI X99A SLI Plus motherboard, which has a dark PCB that fades into the background of the chassis. It has on-board power and reset buttons for easy testing, and it’s there’s also a vacant, fullsized M.2 connector, loads of free SATA ports and three empty 16x PCI-E slots. Its backplate is well stocked too, with eight USB 3 connectors, optical S/PDIF, five analogue audio jacks and a PS/2 plug for older peripherals. There’s also room for four additional memory DIMMs, although one slot is partially blocked by the Alpenföhn CPU cooler.

Graphical power comes from an MSI GeForce GTX 970 card, and MSI has overclocked the GPU from 1,050MHz to 1,102MHz, while the 4GB of GDDR5 memory runs at the standard 7,010MHz (effective) speed. The only slight disappointment in the specs list is the 120GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD. It’s fine in terms of speed – it can’t match PCI-E M.2 drives, but you’re unlikely to notice the difference in most cases. However, its 120GB capacity is soon going to run out once you have a few games installed. Thankfully, the specification is highly customisable, and you can upgrade to a 250GB SSD for an extra £26 inc VAT, which we highly recommend.

The components are all expertly slotted inside a Phanteks Enthoo Pro M chassis. It’s dark, sturdy and spacious, and has loads of room to grow. Extra hard disk cages can be slotted into the front, and there’s room for optical drives and other 5.25in devices too. More 2.5in SSDs can also be added via a pair of dedicated caddies on the rear of the motherboard tray, and there’s a bracket for water-cooling hardware at the top, plus dust filters in the front, base and roof. Meanwhile, the cooling setup is simple, with an Alpenföhn Matterhorn on top of the processor, two 120mm fans at the front and a single 140mm spinner at the rear.

There’s already plenty of room inside the case, and it’s only made better by Overclockers’ neat build. Most cables are hidden beneath a metal shroud at the bottom, and they’re held in place around the back by Phanteks Velcro strips and ties. Cables at the top and bottom of the board are barely visible, and the two GPU power connectors are lashed together with an Overclockers-branded tie.

The Riptide has the standard Overclockers warranty, which gives you two years of collect and return parts and labour coverage, with a further year of return to base labour-only cover. Be warned, though, that the standard specification doesn’t include an operating system – we’ve added it to the price of our review sample, and you’ll have to add it yourself at checkout if you don’t already have a copy of Windows.

Overclockers Titan Riptide inside

Performance


The overclocked 6-core processor helped the Riptide to deliver a solid slate of benchmark results. Its image editing score of 45,994 shows the single-core pace of the overclocked processor, and the six cores delivered a great score of 367,099 in our heavily multi-threaded video encoding test. The overall system score of 140,640 is fantastic too. However, we’ve seen slightly better results from similar setups. The Eclipse Excalibur i7582n970-OC, for example, also had a Core i7-5820K and a GTX 970 but managed an even higher overall score of 151,670, although it did also cost several hundred pounds more than the Titan Riptide.

The Overclockers machine is great in games too, managing playable frame rates in all of our test games at 2,560 x 1,440, and even staying above 60fps in Battlefield 4 and Shadow of Mordor at 1080p. The only borderline title was Crysis 3, which dipped below 30fps at 2,560 x 1,440, but only just, and its 29fps minimum is still well above the 25fps required to be playable.

Meanwhile, the Samsung SSD hit sequential read and write levels of 514MB/sec and 496MB/sec respectively, which are great speeds for a SATA drive – you’d have to step up to the world of PCI-E storage to see quicker results.

We saw no surprises in our thermal tests either. The CPU and GPU returned reasonable delta Es of 63°C and 47°C respectively, and the system never produced more than a low rumble in terms of noise, no matter what task we threw at it. It can be heard in a quiet room, but any noise will easily be crowded out by even modest music or game sounds.

Conclusion


Overclockers aimed to deliver a well-balanced machine that could excel in a wide variety of situations, and we can’t question the Riptide’s versatility or power. The 6-core processor has been overclocked to provide ample power in single- and multi-threaded situations, and the GPU is capable of gaming at 2,560 x 1,440. There’s also loads of memory, a huge 2TB hard disk and room to add more components inside the tidy, versatile case.

Best of all is the price. Even after upgrading the SSD to a 250GB model, the Titan Riptide only costs £1,253 inc VAT. There’s no question about the Riptide’s credentials – if you’re looking for a good value machine that can handle games and multi-threaded workloads, it’s an excellent all-rounder. MIKE JENNINGS

VERDICT
Fast, well balanced and well built, this is a versatile and great value machine for both gaming and heavily multithreaded work.

SPECIFICATIONS
CPU 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-5820K overclocked to 4.2GHz
Motherboard MSI X99A SLI Plus
Memory 16GB Elite Plus TPKD44GM2400HC16BK 2400MHz DDR3
Graphics MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB
Storage 120GB Samsung Evo 850 SSD, 2TB Seagate hard disk
Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro M
Cooling CPU: Alpenföhn Matterhorn Black with 1 x 120mm fan; GPU: 2 x 100mm fans; Front: 2 x 120mm fans; rear: 1 x 140mm fan
PSU Super Flower SF-650P14HE 650W
Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x audio; Rear: 8 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x optical S/PDIF, 5 x audio, 1 x PS/2
Operating system Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Warranty Two years collect and return parts and labour, with a further year return to base labour only