PC Specialist Aurea T900 OC review

We’re used to seeing high-end PCs with off-the-shelf or bespoke water-cooling units, but they’re less common in PCs that dip below £1,000 inc VAT. That hasn’t stopped PC Specialist, though, which has included a CoolIT Eco ALC unit in its £960 Aurea T900 OC.

It might be an off-the-shelf kit, but it’s certainly effective: the Core i5-2500K processor at the heart of this machine peaked at 71 degrees Celsius, despite being overclocked from 3.3GHz to a mighty 4.8GHz. That’s one of the biggest overclocks we’ve ever seen, and its benchmark score of 3.37 is also extremely high.

It’s backed up by an AMD Radeon HD 6870 graphics card, which also proved itself capable. A 41fps average in our Very High quality Crysis benchmark isn’t far behind more expensive rivals – you’ll have to shell out for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 to see a sizeable performance gap -and the system is rounded off by 4GB of DDR3 RAM, a 1TB hard disk and a Blu-ray drive.

It’s the first time we’ve seen an enclosure designed by In Win; its slatted design stands out and build quality is fine too. There’s a control for the 200mm fan lashed to the side of the case, and while the interior isn’t the tidiest we’ve seen, there’s still plenty of expansion potential. The three spare drive bays are tool-free, both vacant DIMMs are accessible and there’s a second PCI Express x16 slot, although it is restricted to x4 speeds.

The 22in Iiyama ProLite E2271HDS looks small next to the 24in panels we’re used to seeing with machines at this price, but its lack of inches is compensated with good quality. It’s LED backlit, sports a 1,920 x 1,080 native resolution, and its colours are bright and accurate.

There is one fly in the Aurea’s ointment, though, and that’s noise. The machine proved very loud when idling, with the low rumble from the water-cooling kit augmented by a high-pitched whine from the graphics card – and it only got louder when stress-tested.

It isn’t disastrous, but when other PCs we've tested manage similar overclocks with simple air coolers, it does make the water-cooling system look unnecessary. Why settle for the Aurea’s aural assault when systems like the Palicomp Phoenix i5 Sniper and Chillblast Fusion Mirage offer such compelling alternatives?

Author: Mike Jennings