PCSpecialist Magnus Spark Review (i5-12400F/RX 6600)

Rating: 8.5.

We've all seen how the price of PC components, particularly GPUs, skyrocketed over the last 18 months, making it almost impossible to build a solid gaming PC on any sort of a budget. Things have been improving recently however, and PCSpecialist is attempting to capitalise on this with the Magnus Spark prebuilt system. Offering an entire PC for £999, this prebuilt packs Intel's hexa-core i5-12400F, an RX 6600 GPU, 16GB DDR4 memory and a 1TB SSD. It sounds good on paper, but what's it like to use in the real world?

Specification

• PCS P209 ARGB MID TOWER CASE
• Intel® Core™ i5 Six Core Processor i5-12400F (2.5GHz)
• ASUS® PRIME B660-PLUS D4 (DDR4, USB 3.2, 6Gb/s)
• 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
• 8GB AMD RADEON™ RX 6600 – HDMI, DP – DX12
• 1TB PCS PCIe M.2 SSD (2200 MB/R, 1500 MB/W)
• CORSAIR 550W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD
• PCS FrostFlow 100 RGB V3 Series High Performance CPU Cooler
• 1x 120mm Black Case Fan
• WIRELESS INTEL® Wi-Fi 6 AX200 2,400Mbps/5GHz, 300Mbps/2.4GHz PCI-E CARD + BT 5.0
• Windows 11 Home 64 Bit

Starting with the case used for the system, this is an own-brand chassis from PCSpecialist, dubbed the PCS 209 ARGB. It's a compact mid-tower, and you can definitely tell it has been built to a price, with fairly thin and cheep-feeling steel used throughout. It's not really the end of the world as most people will simply put this on the floor or on their desk and only ever touch the power button, but it's safe to say the case is one area where PCSpecialist has cut back on cost.

There is a tempered glass side panel though, but slightly more worrying for me is the fact that front panel is completely solid, with just small perforated sections on the sides to allow airflow into the chassis. We'll look at thermal performance of the PC later in this review.

The overall build in the chassis is well done though, with excellent cable management throughout, and there's also plenty of space towards the front of the case to allow for a bigger GPU if you wanted to upgrade down the line. Everything is very stealthy in appearance too, with no hints of colour until the system is powered on, where we see the CPU cooler does light up with RGB LEDs, while there's an LED strip on the front of the case too.

Getting into the components then, we'll start with the motherboard. PCSpecialist has gone with the ASUS Prime B660-PLUS D4, with the ‘D4' denoting the fact that this uses DDR4 memory. It's not a board that will blow you away with its VRM or featureset, but it's proven absolutely rock solid during my testing and I have no real complaints. The only potential negative is the fact that it doesn't have integrated WiFi, so PCSpecialist is using a PCIe add-in card, and this has been placed in the second x16 slot. For most people this is unlikely to be an issue, but say you are one of the few who wants to use a secondary PCIe device, like a capture card, this could prove problematic.

We've also got 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory, clocked in at 3200MHz, with 16-18-18-36 timings. It's a very solid memory kit in my opinion, there's absolutely no need for DDR5 at this price-point and 16GB is going to be plenty for the everyday gamer or user.

Next to that sits a compact air-cooler which is another PCSpecialist-branded part, called the FrostFlow 100 RGB V3. It's a typical tower air cooler in the style of the Hyper 212, with four heatpipes and a single 120mm RGB fan, which should be absolutely fine for the i5-12400F. On the topic of cooling as well, we can note a single 120mm intake fan at the front, with another 120mm exhaust  in the back of the case.

Storage is provided by a 1TB PCS-branded PCIe SSD, and a quick Google suggests Netac is the OEM. It's only a PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD, rated for 2200MB/s reads and 1500MB/s writes, but do note the placement of the SSD in the bottom right of the motherboard – we will discuss this further later in the review.

For the grunt of this PC then, we've already mentioned the i5-12400F, a six-core Alder Lake CPU with all of its cores being of the Performance variety, so there's no Efficient cores here. It's still a very solid processor though, and the Prime B660-Plus D4 motherboard had no issues maintaining it's 4GHz all-core boost during Cinebench's prolonged stress test. Obviously as it is not a K-SKU though, it is not overclockable.

Then for the GPU, we have the AMD RX 6600, specifically the XFX Swift model, which uses a dual-fan cooler with a metal backplate. I did a full review of the RX 6600 and while it's certainly not going to set the world alight, based on current prices I'd say it is the best value card on the market right now, and it is still absolutely fine for 1080p and even some 1440p gaming, as we will get to later.

Powering the whole system is a 550W Corsair TXm PSU, of the semi-modular variety. This is an 80 Plus Gold unit which is great to see, no corners have been cut here with a cheapo 80 Plus Bronze unit, so that is always reassuring. Also, we do have to give PCSpecialist immense credit for the superb cable management at the back of the chassis too, maybe KitGuru modder James Dawson could do an equally stellar job, but I know for sure that I couldn't!

Become a Patron!