OCUK Titan Riptide X99 System Review

We have been rather impressed with Overclockers UK system builds within the last couple of months. The Evolution Wrath System which I reviewed late July walked away with one of our highest awards and there was no questioning the fine attention to detail throughout.

OverclockersUK Titan Riptide X99 is a very subdued looking build – almost monochrome in appearance due to the careful component selection. If you enjoy dazzling LED lights and multicoloured, eye catching components on view through the side window, you will likely be very disappointed. I actually grew rather fond of the appearance throughout the last week of stress testing. It looks ‘serious', and I like that.

As a gaming system, the Titan Riptide X99 is not going to disappoint. Obviously a GTX970 has limitations and won't be an ideal first choice for Ultra HD 4k gaming – unless you reduce image quality, frame rates are going to be too low to be playable. That said if you tweak the configuration tool on the OCUK store page, you add add a GTX980 Ti for an additional £300 cost. The GTX970 is an ideal partner for a 1080p or 1440p panel. Other component choices are stellar, Samsung 850 Evo SSD, fast 2TB storage drive, MSI X99S SLI Plus motherboard and 16GB of high grade TeamGroup Elite DDR4 2,400mhz memory.

Much of the debate right now focuses on the Core i7 5820K which is very competitively priced against the new Skylake Core i7 6700k. Which system should you build? If it was a personal decision, I would have to opt for the X99 platform myself, I firmly believe that ‘more cores is the way to go.' I have an overclocked 5960x gaming system at home and another Xeon based workstation for video editing and rendering – this incorporates a 2697 V2 processor (12 cores, 24 threads). I tend to run multiple programs and use plenty of cores in my daily use, so I would find a 4 core hyperthreaded processor a rather significant downgrade.

In closing I do want to hand over to my colleague Luke Hill, KitGuru's Senior Editor who handles all CPU and motherboard reviews – he has spent several weeks now with Skylake systems and I feel his views on this are an important addition to this review today.

Luke Hill's opinion:

With such a small pricing gap between a system based around the Haswell-E i7-5820K, an entry-level X99 motherboard, and 16GB of quad-channel DDR4 and one that utilises the Skylake i7-6700K, a mid-range Z170 motherboard, and 16GB of dual-channel DDR4, the decision process is a tough one. As we highlighted in the Skylake CPU review, those who prioritise cores, cache, and plentiful PCIe connectivity should opt for the 5820K system. Those who value a feature-filled platform with many of the latest motherboard goodies, such as USB 3.1, will be best served by a Skylake system.

Focusing on CPUs, the 5820K has extra cores, more cache, and plenty of PCIe lanes in its favour, however the 6700K can typically be overclocked higher, has better IPC from newer architecture, and is equipped with an iGPU which may (and this remains to be seen or validated) bring benefits with DX12's multi-GPU options. There's unlikely to be a noticeable performance difference between the 5820K or 6700K CPUs in games, although GTA V has shown that a well-optimised game engine can indeed take advantage of several threads (we saw 10 threads being utilised in our testing shown here).

I think that OCUK's decision to opt for the 5820K is a smart one. Coupling it with the incredibly popular GTX 970 GPU leaves plenty of room for an SLI upgrade in the future. The extra PCIe lane flexibility for an X99 system also means that a PCIe SSD is a viable future upgrade without significant change being made to the hardware. And for those times when you aren't gaming, six well-overclocked Haswell-E cores will provide significantly higher performance in multi-threaded workloads than four fast Skylake cores would.

The sheer quantity of gamers and enthusiasts who consistently reference how happy they are with their 3- or 4-year old Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge systems makes me think that CPU performance is more valuable to them than a feature-healthy chipset and overall platform. And it is for that reason that I think opting for the higher-performance, six-core Haswell-E 5820K is the correct decision by OverclockersUK.

You can configure your own OverclockersUK Titan Riptide system at THIS page, with a starting price of £1,197 inc vat.

Discuss on our Facebook page, over HERE.

Pros:

• first class component selection.
• excellent build quality.
• 5820k is the best value powerhouse processor in Intel's lineup.
• plenty of configuration options such as GTX980 Ti's and Fury cards.
• excellent cooling performance.

Cons:

• Will Skylake prove too tempting for many?

KitGuru says: The OCUK Titan Riptide X99 is a powerhouse rig perfectly capable of delivering super smooth frames rates with the latest game engines. For more serious duties it will also prove difficult to ignore, the extra processing cores, when compared against an identically priced Skylake system is the win for me.

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