Overclockers Titan Dagger review

The Titan Dagger is Overclockers’ value-focussed gaming PC system, coming with everything you need to get started in the world of PC gaming and with plenty of space to upgrade in the future. The Dagger looks sharp thanks to its cheap yet stylish Bitfenix Neos case that comes in eight colour combinations including the black and blue in our review unit.

Take off the side panel of the chassis and you’ll find neatly packaged components and, perhaps most surprisingly, a Prolimatech water cooler for the overclocked dual-core Pentium G3258 processor. The Anniversary Edition Pentium is ripe for overclocking and Overclockers has dutifully done so, taking it from its base speed of 3.2GHz up to 4.2GHz. The water cooler is quieter than most CPU fans and kept the processor cool as it ran through our challenging new benchmarks.

The high clock speed means the image-editing test was completed in under two minutes, giving the system a score of 92 in this test. That’s just eight points off an Intel Core i5-4690K. However, because the processor is a dual-core chip, performance fell off in the multi-core challenging tasks: it scored 59 in the 4K video rendering test and 42 in the multitasking challenge, giving it an overall score of 56. This PC will fly through basic tasks, though, with web pages and productivity software opening in a flash. If you’re going to be editing video, however, expect things to take a bit longer.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 750Ti is the cheapest graphics card available with the Titan Dagger, keeping the price near our £600 target. However, this card is very much an entry-level GPU so some games will need a fair amount of tweaking in order to get them to run smoothly. Dirt Showdown ran at a smooth 47fps in our tests, but 18.3fps in Metro: Last Light was just too low to be considered playable. Knocking down super sampling anti-aliasing we managed to raise this to a much more playable 33fps, however.

The build is tidy and cable management is about as tight as it could be, although because the case has no window you won’t get much time to appreciate the PC builder’s handiwork. If you are looking to replace parts in the future, make sure you have a sharp knife or scissors handy because there are cable ties aplenty inside the Titan Dagger.

You get a single 1TB Seagate Desktop HDD in this base specification model, but there’s plenty of room for expansion if you want to add extra drives later. There are a total of two SATA3 ports and two SATA2 ports, and two are free after the DVD drive (not present in our review model but part of the base specification) and HDD are accounted for. There’s space for three 2.5in SSDs and two extra 3.5in hard disks and two optical drives, too, so you can mix and match as you please.

On the rear of the PC there are four USB ports including two USB3 connectors, with two USB ports on the front, one of which is USB3-compatible. There are also three 3.5mm outputs at the rear in addition to the two at the front of the case. The graphics card has two DVI outputs, one HDMI and one DisplayPort output so you shouldn’t have any trouble connecting to a monitor.

There’s also room for expansion on the motherboard, with three accessible legacy PCI slots and a PCI-E x1 slot for a small sound card or wireless adapter. There’s no room for more RAM, however, because two 4GB 1600MHz DDR3 memory modules fill both slots. You can upgrade to 16GB of RAM, but you’ll have to replace both modules with more expensive 8GB sticks instead of buying some cheaper 4GB sticks.

The quality of the monitor included in this bundle doesn’t quite match the superb PC build. The 21.5in Full HD BenQ DL2215 isn’t particularly good; it covered a reasonable 91.3% of the sRGB colour gamut but failed to impress with a contrast ratio of 423:1 and very narrow viewing angles, with a high degree of colour shift from the top to the bottom of the monitor.

The Microsoft Wired Desktop 400 keyboard and mouse are basic but functional and comfortable to use. The mouse doesn’t have shoulder buttons, and these are often very useful for gaming and web browsing.

Overclockers’s standard three-year warranty gets you two years of collect and return cover and a further year of labour-only cover. The Overclockers Titan Dagger is a decent gaming PC for buyers on a tight budget. It’s a bit more expensive than similarly-specified systems, though and the peripherals leave just a little to be desired. Still, it’s a reasonable all-rounder that’ll handle the latest games at modest graphics settings. Not your cup of tea? Take a look at our regularly updated Best PC list.