Best Hardware of 2015 – The KitGuru Editorial Awards

Desktop Systems

While the majority of KitGuru readers prefer to build your own, one positive thing has come in the wake of the global economic collapse of 2008: Only the best system builders survived. For laptops and desktops, we have gone with an overall winner, a mainstream choice and a system that focuses on offering the best value for money.

In a lot of cases, the size of these system builders means that they are able to buy components for far less money than the average KitGuru reader – so the overall price of a build might be very similar to what you’d achieve when buying the components yourself, separately.

The difference is that these are pre-built systems and any issue you experience becomes the system builder's problem to solve. Worth considering.

Overall
In a world where the name of a simple mouse can extend past 60 characters, we’re quite sure that Nox is the shortest product name we’ve seen this year. While this system from PC Specialist is short on name, it is extremely long on spec.

Eventually, we gave it a score of 9 out of 10 – with the only cons being the lack of an optical drive and the inclusion of a very annoying Bullguard trial version. Let’s leave that behind and focus on specification. At its heart, the Nox has KitGuru’s choice for ‘Best CPU of the Year’, a Core i7 6700K clocked up to 4.6GHz on an ROG Maximus VIII Ranger (which is a close relation to our choice for ‘Overall Best Mainboard of the Year’).

The system boots from KitGuru’s choice for ‘Best Overall SSD for 2015’, the 400GB Intel 750 and that’s backed up by a 2TB Toshiba data drive. The serious overall look and feel comes from the Corsair Obsidian 750D and the 750w Corsair PSU provides ample juice for the GTX980 graphics card – with enough over for a second card should you decide to go SLi in the future.

PC Specialist is the largest local system builder in this market, so it’s a name you can trust. When we filmed our ‘Complete Guide to Workstations’ up at PC Specialists’ building earlier in the year, we were pleasantly surprised with the sheer scale of the operation – you could service a Boeing 787 Dreamliner in their building.

Despite running an operation of that magnitude, they are still really competitive on price. Bought ‘off the shelf’ with the PC Specialist system builder, you would be quoted £1,742 for this spec, but choosing the specific ‘Nox' build means you pay just £1,499.

KitGuru’s choice for Best PC Overall in 2015 goes to the PC Specialist Nox.

Mainstream
When Asus launched the Republic of Gamers brand in 2006, it would have been difficult to foresee the huge impact that the brand would have on the market. Now, as it’s about to start its 10^th year in the industry, the ROG brand is as important to Asus as the ‘M’ team is to BMW.

For our mainstream category, we decided to go for a system that would work in the living room, attached to a TV, as easily as it would serve as a work/HD gaming rig in your bedroom. The Asus GR8 uses an anomaly of a processor, with a dual core Intel Core i7 4510U (TDP just 15w) inside a console-esque body that looks exactly like a PC console should look.

The GTX750 Ti will play games at 1080 on your TV and we achieved an average of 65fps with Tomb Raider on ‘High’ image quality. You will hear the main cooling fan when the system powers up for gaming, but it’s far from noisy.

Since we first saw it last January, the specification has changed slightly, with the main memory dropping from 8GB to 4GB, but the price has also tumbled from £799 to just £629 from a variety of outlets, including supermarkets. Given that it also comes with a half decent keyboard and mouse, at that price, we have a clear winner.

The Asus Republic of Gamers GR8 is KitGuru’s choice for Best Mainstream PC in 2015.

Value
In previous years, a price point of £629 would have comfortably taken our value award, but KitGuru is aware that the average selling price for pre-built systems continues to tumble and we wanted to make sure that 2015’s list of the best products around included one seriously great value system that we first saw back in May, the MSI Cubi.

Effectively a bare bones design with a pre-fitted Intel chipset mainboard and processor included in the base price, you can choose your own spec. Adding components is an easy task. Given that it measure less than 12cm on each side, this kind of PC will effectively disappear next to your screen – and with a power draw between 10w and 24w, you’re never going to notice it on your electricity bill.

Sure, it doesn’t have the raw grunt of something like the Gigabyte Brix S, but if you choose an option with the Core i5 5200U, then you should be able to get games like Dirt to a playable frame rate by dropping the IQ settings and gaming at ~720p.

Booting from an M.2 SSD will make the unit feel lively and responsive – with your home NAS or an expansion drive for ‘real’ storage. Using the Scan basket system, we managed to put together an MSI Cubi wth the 5200U processor, 4GB DDR3L and a 128GB SanDisk M.2 SSD boot drive for £416 – including Windows 10. This is a ‘complete working environment’ PC that you can pick up and move easier than most laptops.

KitGuru’s choice for Best Value PC in 2015 goes to the MSI Cubi.

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