PC Specialist has named its Nova after an intergalactic explosion, so we’re expecting a lot from this sturdy, squat system. It starts well with a Zotac GeForce GTX Titan X. It’s Nvidia’s beefiest graphics card, with the same Maxwell architecture used elsewhere but with almost three billion more transistors than the GTX 980. That translates to 3,072 stream processors, a 1GHz core, and 12GB of GDDR5 memory clocked to 1753MHz.
The Titan X punts the PC Specialist into the £1,999 tier of gaming PCs. CyberPower’s Infinity X77 Deluxe has a GTX 980 Ti GPU, which performs similarly to the Titan X for a significantly cheaper price, while the Chillblast Fusion Hellfire has two overclocked GTX 980 cards.
CPU power comes from a quad-core i7-6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz. That’s the same chip as the CyberPower, although there it ran at 4.7GHz. The outlier is the Chillblast, which deployed a 6-core Core i7-5820K with a 4.2GHz overclock. The Nova’s third high-end component is its Intel 400GB 750 Series SSD, which sits in a PCI-E slot. It’s similar hardware to rivals: the CyberPower has the same SSD, and it isn’t far removed from the Chillblast’s Samsung M.2 drive. You also get a 2TB hard disk and 16GB of 3000MHz DDR4 memory.
The components attach to an Asus Maximus VIII Ranger. It’s a subtle-looking board littered with features: power and reset buttons, plus a POST display, sit at the top and bottom, and the SupremeFX audio circuitry is shielded to prevent interference. There’s also an M.2 slot and plenty of upgrade room – three 1x PCI-E slots and one 16x PCI-E slot lie fallow.
Meanwhile, the Corsair Carbide Air 540 case mixes the unusual with the conventional. It’s a big, dark box that shows off matt steel with slatted and meshed detailing, and its interior layout is a departure from conventional ATX enclosures. The motherboard tray divides the 332mm-wide chassis down the middle, with a large rear section. This arrangement enables PC Specialist to install the modular Corsair RM850 PSU behind the motherboard tray, along with most of its cables and the optical drive, and there’s a four-drive SSD cage around the back too.
The spacious motherboard tray keeps components and cables hidden, making the visible half of the machine clean and smart. The cables are unobtrusive, and the neat build is showed off by the large window and white strip light.
The middle of the machine is dominated by the Titan X, with the Intel SSD below it, and the cooling tubes from the Corsair Hydro H100i GTX cooler above it. Build quality is sturdy, and the entire system looks good – it’s unfussy and well-made, with strength and sensible design throughout.
The Nova has a three-year labour warranty that also includes a year of parts coverage and a month of collect and return service. That isn’t as good as the deals included with other systems: the CyberPower has two years of parts coverage, and the Chillblast PC has a five-year warranty with two years of collect and return protection.
The Nova’s 47fps minimum in Crysis 3 at 2,560 x 1,440 is great for a single-GPU machine, although it couldn’t quite manage a playable frame rate in this game at 4K. The Nova also returned a 31fps minimum in Fallout 4 at 4K with High detail, and it can cope with the game at UItra settings at 2,450 x 1,440 too. Strangely, though, it struggled at 4K with Ultra settings in Fallout 4– a feat that GT 980 Ti machines such as the Overclockers Titan Finesse Phoenix can manage – which we assume must be down to a driver issue somewhere. On the plus side, the Nova hit an excellent minimum of 37fps in The Witcher 3 at 4K with High detail, and still ran at 28fps with Ultra settings.
There’s no doubting the Titan X’s power, but a GeForce GTX 980 Ti card will perform similarly. We’ve changed a couple of our game tests since reviewing the CyberPower Infinity X77 Deluxe, but its Crysis 3 results are very close to those of the Nova. Meanwhile, the dual-GPU Chillblast returned a playable 33fps minimum Crysis 3 at 4K. The Nova has the benefit of being a single-GPU system, so there’s no worry about whether your games will properly work with SLI or not, but the Titan X also pushes up the price.
Meanwhile, in our application tests, the Nova’s image editing score of 65,113 beats the 47,023 from the Chillblast, as this test relies on single-core speed, but it’s behind the CyberPower’s 68,900 with its higher overclock. The Nova’s video encoding score of 323,798 is also behind the Chillblast with its six cores. Despite these differences, though, the Nova’s overclocked CPU offers competitive performance – unless you’re running seriously heavily multi-threaded software, it will be plenty fast enough for your needs.
The Intel SSD also raced through our sequential read and write tests with speeds of 2,070MB/sec and 920MB/sec respectively, being significantly quicker than a SATA drive. We have no qualms about the PC Specialist’s thermal performance either; its CPU delta T of 48°C is particularly excellent for an overclocked CPU, and the Titan X peaked at a decent 60°C. The noise wasn’t bad either. The Nova is quiet when it isn’t tasked with games, and it’s only a little louder when pelting through tough titles – its noise output is a low, consistent rumble that isn’t distracting.
The Nova is a well-built and well designed PC, but while the Titan X graphics card provides serious bragging rights, it pushes up the price while only delivering modest gains over a GTX 980 Ti. For the same price, the CyberPower Infinity X77 Deluxe offers similar gaming performance, a higher CPU overclock and a very snazzy In-Win 805 case. The Nova offers better value on paper, but the CyberPower offers better value for money when it comes to results. The Nova also can’t overhaul the Chillblast Fusion Hellfire.
That machine’s 6-core CPU is quicker in multi-threaded software, and its pair of overclocked GTX 980 cards outpace the Nova in games. The PC Specialist Nova system is an impressive rig that does little wrong, but the strength of its competition and the unnecessary cost of the Titan X graphics card means it just falls short of a recommendation. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
Fast and well built, but the Titan X pushes up the price unnecessarily, meaning you can get a better balance elsewhere.
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU 4GHz Intel Core i7-6700K overclocked to 4.6GHz
Motherboard Asus Maximus VIII Ranger
Memory 16GB Corsair Vengeance 3000MHz DDR4
Graphics Zotac GeForce GTX Titan X 12GB
Storage 400GB Intel 750 PCI-E SSD; 2TB Western Digital Black hard disk
Case Corsair Carbide Series Air 540
Cooling CPU: Corsair Hydro H100i GTX with 2 x 120mm fans; GPU: 1 x 70mm fan; front: 2 x 140mm fans; rear: 1 x 140mm fan
PSU Corsair RM850 850W
Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x audio; rear: 2 x USB 3, USB 3.1 Type-A, USB 3.1 Type-C, 2 x USB 2, Gigabit Ethernet, 1 x PS/2, 5 x audio, optical S/PDIF
Operating system Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Warranty One year parts and labour, plus two years labour only, return to base with first month collect and return