PC Specialist Vanquish Arc Midi Review

Introduction

It wasn’t that long ago that there were definitely three main ways to get yourself a PC. The first was to pop to your local major retailer and purchase a system that had barely any power at all and cost a fair chunk of change for anything remotely capable. The second method was to put down an eye-watering amount of money to a small specialist retailer for a ‘Gaming PC’ which had all the hardware you wanted but was at least twice the price of building your own. The final and most popular option was to do exactly that, build your own. At a time when hardware compatibility and build complexity were genuine issues, it was still a popular option because of the financial savings.

Things have changed dramatically in recent times. As the building of your own system has become immeasurably easier thanks to USB, PCI Express, the simplicity of SATA connections and the eradication of jumpers. When you couple this to the wealth of options it’s no surprise that the Alienware’s of this world have almost become extinct. In their place has arisen a new breed of prebuilt system manufacturers who offer high levels of choice at low prices. One such company is PC Specialist who recently brought us a fantastically powerful laptop at a very affordable price.

Today we’re looking at their Vanquish Arc Midi, a system that emphasises how much performance you can have for a very small outlay, and freed from the potential stress or time sink of doing it yourself.

Technical Specifications

£1200 clearly buys you a lot of performance these days. We start with the Quad Core i5-4670K, a CPU that has enough power for all but the most demanding number crunching users. Kept cool by a Corsair H100i you can be sure that you can have low temperatures at a barely audible volume. Backing this up is 16GB of speedy Kingston Beast memory in the ASUS Maximus VI Hero Z87 motherboard. Storage is handled by a good sized OS drive from Kingston, the HyperX 3K, and a SATA 6Gb/s storage drive.

Graphics are always the first place that anyone casts their eye, and PC Specialist give you a fantastic choice of the two big sellers, the nVidia GTX770 and the Radeon R9 290. You can have either of these without effecting the price of the system, and so to make sure we cover all the bases we’ll be testing both options today.

Vanquish Arc Midi

Intel Core i5-4670K @ 4.2GHz
16GB Kingston HyperX BEAST @ 2400MHz
ASUS Maximus VI Hero Motherboard
120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD
1TB SATA III 6Gb/s HDD
4GB AMD Radeon 290 Graphics or nVidia GTX770
Corsair H100i CPU Cooler
Corsair TX650M Modular PSU
Fractal Design Arc Midi R2
Windows 8.1 64bit
3 Year Warranty

Price: £1199.00 inc VAT & Del