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Today we are back with another prebuilt PC review. This one is from Box Cube and it is certainly going to grab your attention with its dazzling RGB and strong Corsair theme. It's certainly not short of horsepower either, thanks to the Ryzen 7 3700X CPU and Radeon RX 5700 XT GPU. How does it stack up, is it worth the £2180 asking price, and what would it cost to build it yourself? Let’s find out.
Specifications:
- AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
- ASUS Prime X570-Pro Motherboard
- ASUS ROG Strix Radeon RX 5700 XT GAMING 8GB OC Graphics Card
- Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 DRAM 3600MHz Memory Kit – White
- Corsair Force MP600 2TB M.2 2280 PCIE 4.0 NVME SSD
- Corsair iCUE 465X RGB Tempered Glass Mid Tower Smart Case- White
- Corsair Hydro Series H100i RGB PLATINUM 240mm Liquid CPU Cooler
- Corsair RM750x – 750W 80 PLUS Gold Fully Modular PSU Power Supply
- Corsair LL120 RGB 120mm Dual Light Loop White Case Fan
- Triple Pack Corsair LL120 RGB fans with Lighting Node PRO
- Seagate 2TB BarraCuda Desktop Hard Drive
- Windows 10 Home
- 3 years warranty
Our first thoughts when looking at the configuration is certainly a good one. This seems like it will be an excellent all-around performer with almost everything you’d need for productivity, while also being a very capable gaming machine at 1080p and 1440p resolutions.
Box.co.uk’s new CUBE system configurator lets you fully customise your system from the ground up or you can choose a base unit to expand upon. Another benefit of the CUBE configurator is that it only lets you choose items that are currently in stock. Our system here is built using their custom Corsair iCUE config and with our exact specifications comes in at a pretty hefty £2,183.12. We’ll go over price and value on our conclusion page.
When buying a prebuilt system, you want to be happy knowing that it will arrive in one piece. We can safely say the packaging is excellent. A large box over 1 metre squared, with plenty of packaging inside and around the case box that houses the system.
Styling wise and colour choices are spot on, in our opinion. Aesthetically this looks the part with well-matched parts that are placed well within the case, utilising the space correctly. The cable management is very good indeed, we just wish they got that black zip tie on the GPU extension swapped to white and the combs level. Other than that, we can’t fault the construction or part choices.
For the synthetic gaming tests, we tested the GPU’s capabilities with 3DMark benchmarking software. We compared the system to other prebuilt systems we have reviewed in the past, where possible.
Within the Time Spy results you can see what we were all expecting, pretty much identical scores to the other 5700XT systems and not far off the RTX 2070 Super results. Fire Strike we actually took first place, only slightly lower on the Physics CPU score. Fire Strike Ultra saw 3rd place, being beaten by an RTX 2080S, another great result.
Since the 5700XT is aimed towards 1080p and 1440p and not 4K we’ve benchmarked these games at both 1080p and 1440p, choosing the highest settings possible to show you how capable the system is. Remember you can always lower settings to get better results but that’s not the aim here.
Running Call of Duty Modern Warfare, we got excellent results at both 1440p and 1080p, both easily breaking the 100FPS mark, excellent results there. Doom Eternal smashes the FPS bar out of the park hitting nearly 300 FPS at 1080p, 1440p still gives an excellent result over 150FPS. The Division 2 is always a bit of a struggle in comparison but even on Ultra we still have playable frame rates, remember you could get better whilst dipping some settings. The same can be said with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, seeing great scores in 1080p and still very good at 1440p. Finally, we have Resident Evil 2 remake, over 100FPS in both resolutions.
Moving on to our CPU tests, Cinebench R15 gave us an excellent score, placing 4th with our Ryzen 7 3700X and the exact same for Cinebench R20 coming in at 4th place. Time taken to finish rendering the BMW render in Blender was just under 165seconds and that’s also a great result. PCMark 10 shows the computer is more than capable at the tasks undertaken and scores are not that far off the other CPU’s.
Running AIDA64 memory benchmark shows a huge dip in write speed performance. We were expecting this because the system is using an 8-core Zen 2 CPU. 8 cores and below, the Zen 2 chips have roughly a single write path in the IOD. That gives them half the write speed of the 12-core and above, which have the two write paths and ‘normal' write speeds. Perfectly normal for the 8 core and lower Zen 2 chips and doesn't really affect real world performance all that much in general. So, don’t worry too much about that score there.
We put our SSD through its paces with CrystalDiskMark, which saw great read and write speeds.
CPU temperatures were also good considering the stress they were under during our tests. GPU temperatures idling around 56C, hitting 80C during 3DMark and 82C whilst playing games at 1440p.
Noise levels of the system shows us it’s fairly loud but do remember there’s 8 fans inside this excluding the graphics cards fans! Finally, the system power draw comes in around 400W when gaming, putting the 750W at just over 50% load ensuring strong efficiency levels.
Overall, the Box Cube Custom iCUE PC did very well throughout our testing and we saw nothing out of the ordinary at all. It’s an all-around winner, whether that’s productivity or gaming it’ll certainly do the job and do it well at that too. It's also hard to argue with the clean aesthetic, strong build quality and who can forget that dazzling RGB lighting!
Click to enlarge.
Let’s see roughly what Box are charging for a system like this. Bearing in mind that Box offer a 3 year warranty collect and return service covering all parts, plus on the CUBE configurator it states a £100 fee for 10 day standard manufacturing and testing, giving us a total system cost of £2,183.12.
Using PCPartPicker we managed to find the exact parts used, the only thing missing was the Corsair Lighting Node Pro, but you can find these for about £45 at the time of writing so we’ll add that on at the end. So, to build this system yourself you’re looking at £2007.29 + the extra £45 for the Node, giving us a total of £2,052.39. That means you’re paying a £130.73 premium for Box to build this PC for you.
In our opinion? That’s absolutely spot on for the quality of build you’re getting, plus the excellent packaging during transport, the 3-year warranty and the ease of customising the system via Box’s new CUBE configurator. We totally think it’s worth it if you absolutely cannot build your own system for one reason or another.
The system is a winner in our eyes, it looks absolutely stunning and performs excellently across the board but one thing we’d say if you’re considering a prebuilt, or even building yourself, remember that the next generation of graphics cards are right around the corner, so if you can wait for either a better card or potentially better priced current cards, that is always something to consider
You can purchase a system with the same specs (providing parts are in stock) that we reviewed and configure your own Box.co.uk custom PC, HERE!
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
Pros:
- CUBE configurator is easy to use.
- Excellent configuration.
- Superb cable management.
- Colour scheme is consistent and well thought out.
- Space properly utilised inside the case.
- Excellent airflow with 8 Corsair fans.
- Performs very well across the board.
- Comes well packaged.
Cons:
- We'd have liked to see white zip-ties on the GPU cables, and the cable combs weren't lined up either.
- Next generation GPUs out soon, may be an idea to wait
KitGuru says: We think anyone that wants a prebuilt system would be happy with the quality and service they’d be getting from Box.co.uk and their new CUBE configurator. This system is more than capable of almost any task you throw at it.
