Gladiator Apocalypse Mid-Tower Gaming PC Review

The Gladiator Apocalypse has a quad-core Skylake processor with a 3.2GHz Turbo Clock, 8GB of memory and a GeForce GTX 970, and costs just £750. While that’s a purely mid-range specification, it’s more than enough to enjoy PC games at high detail settings at 1080p resolution. Good news, folks. Around the world, gaming has never been more popular, and in particular, PC gaming is on the upsurge, attracting a new type of audience who once would not have even considered another option beyond the latest games consoles. But unfortunately, while the PC gaming audience may have changed, the cost of a PC that can run the latest games is still significantly higher than consoles. Sure, a £299 entry-level desktop system will get you by with Word documents and Facebook, but not 1080p 60fps frame rates in really demanding titles. We all know how much a really high-end system can cost, with custom-built water-cooling kits and top-end video cards such as the AMD Fury X or Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan. The bulk of sales are in the mid range though, where PCs have the rendering grunt to get by in most games, but without the major bells and whistles that add so much to the cost, such as gaming at 4K resolution, and so on. It’s these users that Gladiator is targeting with its Apocalypse Gaming PC, a £749.99 system configured to appeal to people whose budget simply cannot stretch to a really high-end PC, regardless of the performance it offers. The main guts of the system are an Intel Core i5 processor, based on the most up-to-date Skylake architecture, an Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, which is one of the most popular video cards around, and 8GB of memory. A reasonable specification that’s enough for most games, but interestingly, Gladiator has managed to squeeze a few extras into the budget, the most notable of which is an attractive AeroCool Aero 800 case with some funky blue lighting into this budget, rather than trying to save money by using a cheap, standard black tower without any discernible features, as some manufacturers might do. System Configuration: Case: AeroCool Aero 800 Windows Midi Tower (blue lighting) CPU: Intel Core i5-6400 2.7GHz base clock (3.2GHz Turbo) (4 cores, 4 threads) Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo Memory: 8GB 3000MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR4 Motherboard: Asus Z170-E GPU: Asus Strix Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 4GB Storage 1: 1TB Seagate SATA III Hard Disk Storage 2: none PSU: 600w AeroCool Integrator 80+ 85% Eff Power Supply Operating System: Windows 10 Home 64-bit Price £749.99 BUY HERE As with all retail PCs, the Gladiator Apocalypse arrived in two boxes, with the outer packaging protecting the PC from knocks and scrapes from rough handling in transit that might dent the case. Unfortunately Gladiator packed the outer box with hundreds of tiny styrofoam pieces which ended up on the carpet. Not a good start. But once that was cleared up, the Apocalypse emerged unscathed from this mess, housed in the box for the AeroCool Aero 800 case. The motherboard box has all the packaging for each of the components, from the SLI cables that come with the video card, the memory packaging, screws and some Haribo sweets. Additionally you get all the manuals, Windows 10 DVD and a thank you note. The insides of the PC are also protected with styrofoam, which needs removal before use. Sitting on a desk, the Gladiator Apocalypse looks very stylish, in the white option our review sample arrived in. It’s an AeroCool Aero 800 Midi Tower, with plenty of internal space for additional components. The power and reset buttons, activity LEDs and audio ports are located at the top, along with a pair of USB 2 ports and a pair of USB 3 ports. The top filter is only held in place with magnets, and while it sits in place during normal use, it can come off quite easily, exposing the internal components through the gaps. There’s a side window. Compared with some ATX motherboards, the Asus Z170-E is relatively frugal with its provisioning of ports. Twin USB 2 and two USB 3 compliment the ports at the front, with six-channel audio, a legacy PS/2 connector, ethernet, an HDMI port for the on-board graphics (which, of course, is only ever of use if your main GPU breaks) and a DVI port. Additionally, there’s a single USB 3.1 type-C connector. The Asus GTX 970 Strix has dual DVI outputs, HDMI, and DisplayPort. Looking at the other side, you can see Gladiator has done a good job with cable management. The view from inside the case shows a tidy arrangement. The only storage included is a single 1TB hard disk, accessed from the other side of the case. There are two intake fans at the front. In the Steam age, the inclusion of an optical drive seems almost superfluous these days, and is £10 we would rather spent on some more modern technology (*cough* SSD *cough*). The Gladiator Apocalypse uses a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 Evo air cooler. You can also see the two memory slots occupied by 4GB DDR4 DIMMs, leaving another two free to use for expansion. The Asus Strix GTX 970 uses a heat pipe design for reduced noise output, rather than massively increased GPU performance. And there’s a lighting kit installed. It’s a very striking effect, with a blue LED running alongside the bottom of the case and blue LEDs in the front fans. This also lights up the whole inside of the case. We’ve given our testing procedure a bit of a spring clean for this review, namely with an update to the games we use for testing. Out go Tomb Raider, Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and Metro Last Light: Redux, and in their place The Witcher III and the new Direct X 12 game, Ashes of the Singularity join our firm favourite Grant Theft Auto V. Ashes Of The Singularity is a punishing benchmark, an RTS game in the vein of Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation, with hundreds of units on screen at once, surrounded by drones, firing weapons that illuminate that area around them. There’s a lot going on and it brings systems to their knees. With DirectX 12 features, it’s also a way to test the new Windows 10 API on current generation hardware. The Witcher III is an open-world RPG with extremely detailed textures and facial animation, a real test for most GPUs. We record performance using FRAPs, taken during the very first part of the game where Gerald is watching his protege Ciri practice her moves. Grand Theft Auto V scales well with GPU performance, an open-world game with plenty of action happening at any one time, with AI routines running on the CPU to determine the behaviour of dozens of NPCs. Unlike the other two games, it does not have preset detail settings, so we use our own, with most settings turned up to maximum. For these results, we run the in-game benchmark, which provides five frame rates, then average out those scores. The Gladiator Apocalypse is configured at default clock speeds. With a default clock of 2.7GHz, it scales up to 3.2GHz in Turbo Mode in this configuration. We’re pleased to see the list of installed programs upon first boot was notably empty of any bloatware, antivirus or useless app store. The Asus Strix GTX 970 has 1,664 shaders with a GPU base clock of 1,114MHz, and a boost clock of 1,253MHz. It uses a cooler with a heat pipe, which is visible in our images. Software tests: 3DMark 11 3DMark Cinebench R11.5 64 bit Cinebench R15 CrystalDiskMark Atto Disk Benchmark CrystalDiskMark SiSoft Sandra Games: Ashes Of The Singularity The Witcher III Grand Theft Auto 5 3DMark 11 is designed for testing DirectX 11 hardware running on Windows 7 and Windows Vista the benchmark includes six all new benchmark tests that make extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. After running the tests 3DMark gives your system a score with larger numbers indicating better performance. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to test DirectX 11 under game-like loads. Solid performance here, with results that aren’t record breaking, but are at least competitive. Systems built with Intel’s Core i7-6700K processor really pull ahead on the physics test though, with results that are almost double what the Gladiator Apocalypse achieves. 3DMark is an essential tool used by millions of gamers, hundreds of hardware review sites and many of the world’s leading manufacturers to measure PC gaming performance. Once again, performance in both these tests is let down by poor physics scores compared with systems that use the Core i7-6700K. SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting. It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc. While memory performance is only about 15% lower than a typical Core i7-6700K system, Sandra’s CPU arithmetic tests show roughly 50% of the performance of an (overclocked) Intel Core i7-6700K system. CINEBENCH R11.5 64 Bit is a real-world cross platform test suite that evaluates your computer’s performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON’s award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Spider-Man, Star Wars, The Chronicles of Narnia and many more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and Mac OS X). And best of all: It’s completely free. This isn’t a great result for the Intel Core i5-6400. Cinebench scales very well with extra cores, and without the hyper threading or higher clock speed of the Core i7-6700K, it falls behind considerably. CINEBENCH 15 is a cross-platform testing suite that measures hardware performance and is the de facto standard benchmarking tool for leading companies and trade journals for conducting real-world hardware performance tests. With the new Release 15, systems with up to 256 threads can be tested. CINEBENCH is available for both Windows and OS X and is used by almost all hardware manufacturers and trade journals for comparing CPUs and graphics cards. Once again, the Gladiator Apocalypse falls behind in this test, as the processor isn’t the strong point of its hardware. There's no SSD in the Gladiator Apocalypse, so we could only test the hard disk used for the main storage, which offers sequential performance that's roughly equivalent to most disks on the market. Roughly 175MB/sec read and 161MB/sec write. In The Witcher 3 We run through the early scene where Gerald is chastising Ciri for being a rebellious teenager, performing cartwheels and practising sword fighting, while blindfolded. We test at three resolutions - 1080p, 1440p and 4K, and two in-game detail settings, ‘High’ and ‘Ultra’. The game really tests a graphics card to the limit. At 1080p it's absolutely playable, almost holding a steady 60 fps. Likewise it's playable at 1440p although its not holding a solid 60fps. In games, the GeForce GTX 970 delivers excellent performance, which explains why it’s currently one of the most popular graphics cards around. In the Gladiator Apocalypse, it enables superb 1080p and good 1440p performance, but it doesn’t cut the mustard at 4K. You could drop the image quality settings at 4k to help improve frame rates but it seems counter productive. Grand Theft Auto V is an action-adventure game played from either a first-person or third-person view. Players complete missions—linear scenarios with set objectives—to progress through the story. Outside of missions, players can freely roam the open world. Composed of the San Andreas open countryside area and the fictional city of Los Santos, the world of Grand Theft Auto V is much larger in area than earlier entries in the series. The world may be fully explored from the beginning of the game without restrictions, although story progress unlocks more gameplay content. (Wikipedia). We maximised every slider – FXAA was enabled, although we left all other Anti Aliasing settings disabled – based on reader feedback from previous reviews. ‘Ignore Suggested Limits’ was turned ‘ON’. We tested at 1080p, 1440p and 4K resolutions. The average frame rate is a little lower than you are likely to experience in game. At 4K the GTX970 runs out of horsepower but we already knew that. One or two GTX980 Ti's is a much better option, if 4k gaming is important. Lastly, Ashes Of The Singularity is the most demanding benchmark in our suite. It animates hundreds of units on the battlefield, with particle and lighting effects, dozens of drones and vast armies of tanks. It’s currently only in beta, but is the only real game that right now offers a DirectX 12 client. Expect performance to improve after the game is released. There are three detail settings - high, crazy and extreme, and three resolutions for nine tests in total. 4K Surprising results here. Performance seems to drop off considerably at higher detail levels but the game just about remains playable at 4K with “high” detail setting. At crazy detail, 4K is out of the question, while even at 1080p, the Gladiator Apocalypse is unable to reach an average of 30fps. And “Crazy” detail is simply too much. Subjectively, we couldn’t see a great difference in image quality between the settings. We measure acoustics performance using an iPhone app called Decibel10, measuring the background noise with the PC off, when idle, and when running 3dMark . KitGuru noise guide 10dBA – Normal Breathing/Rustling Leaves 20-25dBA – Whisper 30dBA – High Quality Computer fan 40dBA – A Bubbling Brook, or a Refrigerator 50dBA – Normal Conversation 60dBA – Laughter 70dBA – Vacuum Cleaner or Hairdryer 80dBA – City Traffic or a Garbage Disposal 90dBA – Motorcycle or Lawnmower 100dBA – MP3 player at maximum output 110dBA – Orchestra 120dBA – Front row rock concert/Jet Engine 130dBA – Threshold of Pain 140dBA – Military Jet takeoff/Gunshot (close range) 160dBA – Instant Perforation of eardrum The results show superbly low noise levels, thanks to the Asus Strix GTX 970, where the extra thermal headroom of the cooler is used not to simply increase clock speeds but for lower fan speeds, resulting in quieter operation. We test power consumption at the socket with a calibrated meter under the following conditions. 1: when idle 2: running Grand Theft Auto 5 at Ultra HD 4K. The monitor is not factored into the power draw, just the demand via the system power supply. The idle power consumption is higher than some PCs we've tested, but under load it is all normal. When we heard the price of the Gladiator Apocalypse was just £750, we weren’t expecting to see hugely impressive gaming performance when it arrived in the Kitguru labs. As it turns out, the results are surprisingly good. It’s all thanks to the GeForce GTX 970. It isn’t hard to see why this card is one of the best selling GPUs on the market. While the Core i5-6400 processor isn’t exactly a powerhouse - it cannot be overclocked, it doesn’t support hyper threading and it tops out at 3.2GHz, the GTX 970 has enough polygon-pushing performance to drive solid 1080p gaming in all our tests. That’s not bad for the money. And it’s impressive that Gladiator has chosen an attractive case with a lighting kit, that doesn’t immediately look like it’s aimed at inexpensive PCs. There’s isn’t a massive amount of storage and the 8GB of memory isn’t much, but it’s just enough to get by. While 4GB of memory isn’t enough these days and 16GB is standard in high-end PCs, 8GB will run nearly all games without a problem. If I was buying the PC, I would ask Gladiator to upgrade the memory to 16GB, as the cost would be minimal and you get more peace of mind for futureproofing. As with all PCs now, we can’t advocate an SSD enough, it makes such a difference to performance, so we’d suggest adding that as a custom option when purchasing. Swapping the 1TB hard disk for a 256GB SSD adds £36 to the price, while adding it as a second storage device with a 1TB hard disk as well, increases the price by £74. Worth it for the extra performance. Otherwise, the Gladiator Apocalypse is fairly impressive in other respects. It’s noise levels in particular are as good as some of the more expensive PCs we’ve tested. It certainly deserves a recommendation. Buy the Gladiator Apocalypse gaming PC HERE Pros: Great gaming performance for the money. Good looking lighting effects. Great case for a mid-range PC. Cons: Weak CPU performance No SSD in default configuration Kitguru Says: Solid frame rates at 1080p resolution is the best that be achieved in the mid-range price bracket, and the Gladiator Apocalypse delivers just that. A very good system, and worth recommending for anyone who’s on the fence about PC gaming, although we absolutely suggest customising it with an SSD upgrade for better all-round responsiveness.