The Titan Finesse Phoenix has a consistent red and black theme. The NZXT Noctis 450 case is black throughout, and Overclockers has cleverly made it glow with crimson There are strip lights in the roof, fans that illuminate meshed areas and more lights under the chassis to provide a warming red glow from beneath. The colouring continues to the components. The Asus motherboard and MSI graphics card both have black heatsinks tinged with red, and the visible power cables are braided in both colours.
The Noctis 450 is practical too. The smart shroud on the bottom of the interior keeps the PSU and its cables hidden, while also providing two spare 2.5in bays. Meanwhile, a slab of metal at the front hides four empty drive bays that can be reached by removing the rear panel. The rubber-lined cablerouting holes also enable Overclockers to keep the build neat and tidy, and the case is well built. The raised plastic used to form the Noctis’ angular raised sections never budges, and there’s only a little give in the side panels.
Meanwhile, gaming power comes from an MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti card that includes three performance modes with various speed tweaks. Overclockers has gone one better, though, by raising the core to 1240MHz and the 6GB of GDDR5 memory to 1903MHz (7612MHz effective) – higher than any of the card’s preset options.
The Core i7-6700K CPU has also been overclocked from 4GHz to 4.6GHz, which is a solid overclock, especially considering that there’s no liquid cooling. Instead, the CPU is cooled by a large Alpenföhn Matterhorn air cooler. The rest of the Phoenix’s specification is pleasingly familiar. There’s 16GB of 3000MHz DDR4 memory, and storage is split between a Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD and a 2TB hard disk. The 128GB boot drive will have better speed than SATA drives, although it’s a shame there isn’t 250GB of solid state storage space. You also get a superb Super Flower Leadex Platinum 850W PSU, which is both quiet and exceptionally efficient.
Then there’s the Asus Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard, which is a solid choice, offering SLI support and a pair of 1x PCI-E slots for future upgrades. Its audio chips are also isolated from the rest of the circuitry to prevent interference, and its backplate has USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C connectors alongside more conventional ports. It’s a solid, well-featured board that only misses out on enthusiast-level additions; there aren’t any buttons or on-board POST displays, and it doesn’t have snazzy-looking heatsinks.
Finally, the warranty gives you two years of the all important parts coverage, with a collect and return service, and that’s followed by a further year of labour only return to base cover.
The overclocked GTX 980 Ti proved adept in games benchmarks. It flew through Fallout 4 at 2,560 x 1,440 with the game’s Ultra settings, and it delivered a decent minimum of 28fps with the game running at 4K – a solid result that means the title will be borderline playable.
The Phoenix was even faster in The Witcher 3. The machine’s 2,560 x 1,440 minimum frame rate of 79fps is butter-smooth, and it ran through the game’s 4K benchmark at 42fps – another top-notch result that could even give you the headroom needed to enable advanced features such as HairWorks. In short, this £1,667 machine can convincingly handle 4K gaming – only minor graphical tweaks will smooth out stutters in the toughest of titles, and that means there’s ample power for VR in the future as well.
The CPU is no slouch either. Its image editing score of 66,742 is about right for a 4.6GHz Core i7-6700K, and the video encoding score of 328,834 is solid too – 6-core machines are quicker, but the 6700K’s Hyper-Threading support gives it an edge in this test over the Core i5-6600K. The Phoenix returned an overall score of 151,939, which is a great result. The Samsung SM951 SSD is quick too, using its 4x PCI-E 3 bandwidth to hit read and write speeds of 2,070MB/sec and 920MB/sec respectively.
The high-end components, reliance on air cooling, close confines and numerous fans all contributed to a middling thermal performance though. The CPU’s delta T of 67°C was calculated from a peak CPU temperature of 90°C at load, which is a little high, although within thermal limits, and the graphics card delta T peaked at a toasty 56°C as well.
Those warm figures are paired with a consistent deep rumble from the litany of fans. It doesn’t vary, and it isn’t irritatingly noisy, but the sound is certainly noticeable, especially when compared with a well-tuned quiet machine such as the near-silent Scan 3XS Z170 Vengeance Q.
The Titan Finesse Phoenix offers 4K gaming abilities and solid application performance, along with a striking black and red design, for a very reasonable price. It isn’t without issues. It gets hot, and it’s a tad noisy compared with other machines in this league, but you can’t argue with the performance you get for the money, and you get a well-balanced selection of components too. It’s a rig that excels in several important areas rather than concentrating on one area to the detriment of others. If you’re looking for a fast, good-looking and well-built gaming rig that doesn’t bump up the price with superfluous extras, the Phoenix is a great machine. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
Fast in every benchmark and with a striking design, this is a well-balanced and well-built gaming rig.
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU 4GHz Intel Core i7-6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz
Motherboard Asus Z170 Pro Gaming
Memory 16GB 3000MHz Team Group Dark Pro DDR4
Graphics MSI GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB
Storage 128GB Samsung SM951 M.2 SSD; 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk
Case NZXT Noctis 450
Cooling CPU: Alpenföhn Matterhorn with 1 x 120mm fan; GPU: 2 x 100mm fans; front: 3 x 120mm fans; rear: 1 x 140mm fan; top: 3 x 120mm fans
PSU Super Flower Leadex Platinum 850W
Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 2 x audio; rear: 4 x USB 3, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 1 x USB 3.1 Type-C, 2 x USB 2, 1 x PS/2, Gigabit Ethernet, 5 x audio, optical S/PDIF
Operating system Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Warranty Two years parts and labour collect and return, followed by one year labour only return to base