PC Specialist Vortex XT-270FB System Review

Many of the pre-configured systems we review are supplied with a plethora of applications installed which really should be left in the hands of the end user. This is certainly not a concern with the PC Specialist Vortex as the company have only installed the bare minimum of drivers and software, including Nero 9 Essentials and a trial of Microsoft Office 2010.

Windows 7 Home Premium with Service Pack 1 is installed, and PC Specialist have customised the system overview to highlight customer support information. Handy in an emergency if the literature is misplaced.

The Windows Experience Index is a decent way to get a quick overview of how a system will perform. The Vortex XT-270FB scores 7.6 out of 7.9 points, being held back by the AMD HD7970. Never thought I would say that in a review!

CPUz gives a good overview of the system, highlighting the 4.8ghz overclock state with the Core i7 2700k. We have reviewed this processor before, it is a 32nm design, which runs at 3.5ghz in a default state. All ‘K' series processors are completely unlocked and the 2700k is supported with an 8MB level 3 cache.

The Kingston HyperX memory runs at 1600mhz with timings of 9-9-9-27 @ 1T.

The HD7970 Tahiti core operates at 925mhz, and the 3GB of GDDR 5 memory runs at 1375mhz (5.5Gbps effective) which is connected via a 384 bit interface for over 264GB/sec of bandwidth. The card features 2,048 stream processors, is fully PCI E Gen3 compliant (up to 32 gb/s of data bandwidth) and incorporates new AMD Powertune and ZeroCore power technology. There are dual geometry engines, eight render back ends, 32 color ROPs per clock and 128 Z/stencil ROPs per clock.

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