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In terms of raw gaming performance, the PCSpecialist Zircon Goliath is an absolute beast. It’s not a surprise as it’s equipped with the current best gaming CPU and graphics combination. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D excels at gaming and productivity tasks so this system is very capable at everything, the perfect all-rounder you could say. Even pushing high resolution and cracking up the eye candy, the system will run at consistently high frame rates which is what you want when spending so much on a gaming PC.
Another good bit of news is that the price of the system seems to be very competitive. £3499 sounds like a lot of money to be spending on a gaming PC but when you calculate the cost of buying the hardware components separately and building yourself using PCPartpicker, it works out at over £3900 which is a significant amount more than getting PCSpecialist to do the work for you, I can't argue with that. For someone who might not be confident enough to build their own system, this is ideal.
However, we did run into a couple of issues with the system which are highlighted in the video. On initial power on the system refused to POST, we were just greeted with no display and the motherboard error LEDs hung on VGA. This was an easy problem to troubleshoot as it was quickly noticed that the PCIe riser cable was not correctly seated in the PCIe slot, whether this was due to assembly error or mishandling during shipping is up for discussion.
As easy as it was to diagnose this problem it was also just as easy to rectify by plugging the cable in and making sure it was correctly clamped in place with the locking tab. We reached out to PCSpecialist about this issue, they assured us that they would look into why this happened and will put measures in place to make sure this doesn’t happen in future.
The high-temperature issues seen with the GPU and CPU were also a bit of a worry as they could impact system performance, something you don’t want happening on a high-end gaming system, especially if you plan on doing some competitive gaming when every frame counts. The choice of case and cooler attributed to these temperature issues, a better choice of case and cooler might be worth looking at for PCSpecialist with the Zircon Goliath.
The chassis choice is the main problem here. There just isn’t enough space between the graphics card fans and the tempered glass side panel, the fans sit too close to the glass and airflow is choked off. There is no alternative in this chassis as you are forced to vertical mount the graphics card. Adding more fans didn’t seem to help, the only solution was to remove the tempered glass side which saw GPU core temperature tumble and frequency improve.
Even though it’s a great-looking system with top gaming hardware and the potential for the best gaming experience, it’s not a system that I would recommend purchasing in this configuration with this case and CPU cooler. Change out the case for one with better airflow and look into why the Corsair iCUE H150i Elite LCD XT was underperforming and PCSpecialist will be on to a winner but as it is, it's not quite reaching its potential which is disappointing.
The PCSpecialist Zircon Goliath is available to purchase directly from PCSpecialist for £3499 HERE. Since producing this review PCSpecialist has updated the configuration of the Zircon Goliath, it's no longer available with Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR5-6000 but is now equipped with Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR5-600, we don't anticipate that the change in memory will affect any of our performance results.
Pros:
- Good value for money.
- Great 4K gaming potential.
- Good hardware matching/looks good.
Cons:
- Loose PCIe riser cable causing no boot.
- GPU thermals are not good.
- CPU cooler poor performance.
- Not the best choice of case for this spec.
KitGuru says: Although it is equipped with the best gaming hardware and at a very competitive price, the faults with the system and high thermals put us off a bit. If PCSpecialist revises the configuration with a higher airflow case and better CPU cooling it'll be a great system at a great price. Let's hope it gets the improvements it deserves.
