KitGuru Annual Awards 2013

The vast majority of what KitGuru reviews, centres on components. We know you are all bonafide experts in the dark arts of building and clocking. That said, when a high quality PC company manages to put all the parts together, at a really competitive price, and guarantee their work for 3 years – you have to ask yourself, “Why bother building?”

Before we get to the specific system that has won our KitGuru Best Desktop PC of 2013, let us consider what that budget should be and which components should be included.

As we have said all along, at this kind of price point, the focus needs to be on playing Direct X 11 games at decent image quality settings while generating steady 30+ frame rates.

Intel's Core i5-4670K may not have won the same kind of universal appeal among overclockers as, say, the 2500K before it – but it is still a powerful processor and easily capable of holding an OC past 4GHz 24/7.

For gaming, you need a serious graphics card and a Radeon 280X with 3GB of memory is extremely good value, so well worth considering in your build.

While balancing price with quality, you need at least a 120GB SSD to be able to unleash the power of the rest of your system – and Kingston is a top brand in this department. We can pair that with a traditional spinning disk (minimum 1TB), for flexibility/longevity.

That brings us to memory – and why not include 16GB of KitGuru's choice for ‘Best Budget Memory of 2013' – Kingston HyperX Beast at 2,400MHz?

Building up your rig on an award winning Asus Z87-A mainboard, inside a Corsair chassis with Corsair PSU and Cooler Master's Seidon 120M cooler (a strong contender for ‘CPU Cooler of the Year')  – and you can see which areas we are playing in. All of these components represent a really smart choice.

Now what if you could get all that, including Windows and a 3 year warranty, for just £999 – would that tempt you?

KitGuru's Best Desktop PC of 2013 goes to the PC Specialist Vanquish 230X for all those reasons.

We visited their extended premises back in March and were suitably impressed with the set up and technical capability. You can't make everyone happy all the time, but PC Specialist seems to have been making most of their customers happy, most of the time, for many years now.

Impressive build and specification – and a worthy winner.

No matter what kind of system you want to end up with – you could do a lot worse than starting with the PC Specialist Vanquish 230X as your baseline and ‘upgrading it' to your exact spec.

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