If you’ve been to our website in the past couple weeks, you might have noticed the video installments we’ve been posting that follow the painting, Hydrodipping, and final assembly of a custom-built gaming system from XOTIC PC. It all comes down to this, the Tytan, a small form-factor gaming PC that’s packed with some seriously powerful components wrapped in an attractive box.
The enclosure XOTIC chose for the Tytan is the Lian Li PC-O5S, a wallmountable open-air case custom-made by Lian Li for XOTIC that resembles a significantly scaled-down Thermaltake Core P5. The case will be used for the entire Tytan line in the future. There’s a 5mm-thick sheet of smoked tempered glass on the side panel and a series of aluminum panels on the top, bottom, side, and back. As we mentioned, the case has been painted tuxedo black on the outside, gunmetal grey on the inside, and the front panel was etched with XOTIC PC’s logo, painted torch red, then Hydrodipped with a carbon fiber film. The custom builder installed red and white translucent film and LEDs behind the XOTIC logo, making it the highlight of the front panel. There’s also an RGB LED kit installed in the system and a remote for switching the colors at will.
For anyone looking to configure a PC with XOTIC, component selection is really up to you. For this system, however, we let XOTIC go wild, and as such, they installed the ASUS Z170I Pro Gaming Mini-ITX motherboard and paired it with the quad-core Intel Core i7-6700K, clocked at 4GHz.
Fully aware of our penchant for gaming, XOTIC PC installed the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti FTW Edition, which features EVGA’s quiet and powerful ACX 2.0+ cooler, 8+1 power phases, a preinstalled aluminum backplate, and an LED backlit logo. This card features 6GB GDDR5 memory, a 384-bit memory bus, and base and boost clocks set to 1,190MHz and 1,291MHz, respectively. Not many graphics cards available can handle the rigors of 4K today, but this one is more than up to the task. We also love that the case XOTIC chose really puts this card on full display.
There’s 16GB (2 x 8GB) of Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4-2666 memory installed in the two DIMM slots. The system booted with the memory running at 2,133MHz, but we hopped into the BIOS, enabled XMP, and were running at 2,666MHz in the two seconds it took to boot back into Windows 10. The storage subsystem in our unit was also kicked up a notch from the base Tytan listed at XOTIC PC’s website. There’s a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD for our secondary storage device and the OS drive consists of a 256GB Samsung 950 PRO M.2, which is an NVMe device that’ll give this system some serious pep whether reading or writing data.
To power the system, XOTIC PC installed the compact-but-capable 600W Silverstone Gold SFX PSU. The CPU cooler is Corsair’s H100i v2 closed-loop cooler with a 240mm radiator. Impressively, that large radiator resides in the top panel (when this desktop-style case is set upright). XOTIC PC replaced the case fans with Thermaltake Riing fans, giving the system even more visual appeal. Other extras include a slot-load 6X Blu-Ray Writer/Reader Super Multi Combo Drive.
The front of the case features a pair of USB 3.0 ports, front-panel audio jacks, and a power button. On the motherboard’s rear I/O panel you’ll find four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port, two USB 3.1 (type A) ports, and an RJ45 Ethernet port that corresponds to Intel’s I219V Gigabit LAN controller. Audio ports include five audio jacks and an optical S/PDIF audio port backed by a SupremeFX 8-channel high definition audio CODEC. There are a pair of Wi-Fi antenna ports on the back panel and they let you take advantage of the board’s integrated 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac adapter with Bluetooth V4.1 support included for good measure.
In the benchmarks, the Tytan’s fast memory and powerful processor enabled high scores in Cinebench 15, POV-Ray, and the SANDRA tests. The impressive PCMark score shows what a great all-around performer this system is and 3DMark’s 8,458 overall score shows how well the Tytan is likely to handle modern games. When we ran our stable of real-world game tests at 4K, Metro: Last Light and Dying Light both averaged better than 45 frames per second. Although Shadow Of Mordor and The Witcher 3 dipped below 40fps, the Tytan still produced solid playable framerates in both of these demanding titles. If you’re playing at anything less than 4K, expect better than 60fps in most games.
Having watched this system come together from the painting, Hydrodipping, and assembly stages, we witnessed a lot of the thoughtfulness, experience, and even a little of the art that XOTIC PC puts into every one of its builds. If you’re ready to buy a really eyecatching notebook or desktop, XOTIC PC is a solid place to start.
Specs (as tested): CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K; Graphics: EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti FTW Edition; RAM: 16GB Kingston HyperX Predator DDR4-2666; Motherboard: ASUS Z170I Pro Gaming Mini-ITX; Storage: 256GB Samsung 950 Pro M.2 (Primary), 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD (secondary); PSU: 600W Silverstone Gold SFX; Cooling: Corsair H100i V2 CPU cooler with 240mm rad; 3 x 120mm Thermaltake Riing Fans