Wired2Fire Pyro Talon review: A huge amount of processing power for less than £900

This compact gaming PC gives us our first look at another of AMD’s second­-generation Ryzen CPUs, the Ryzen 5 2600. This has the same six cores and 12 threads as its mid-range stablemate, the Ryzen 5 2600X, and trades off slightly lower clock speeds for a lower 6W TDP (the 2600X is rated at 95W).

Out of the box, you’d see it running with a base clock of 3.4GHz and a boost clock of 3.9GHz, inclusive of all its maximum Extended Frequency Range and Precision Boost gains. Here, Wired2Fire has overclocked it to target a constant 3.8GHz. Setting a CPU to aim for speeds lower than its highest boost clock might not make much sense, but as the Ryzen 7 2700X shows, the new Ryzen chips can see decent performance gains under such conditions.

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Rounding out the Pyro Talon’s key specs list are its 6GB lnno3D GTX 1060 graphics card, 16GB of DDR4 memory, 250GB SSD and 2TB hard disk. Yet it’s that brand-new processor that demands our attention, so let’s get stuck into how it did in our 4K benchmarks: 137 in the image test, 218 in the video test, 255 in the multitasking test and 223 overall.

This is a fantastic set of results for two reasons. First, it’s a powerful opening statement by the chip itself. With this overclock, which ran stably on the modest AMD stock air cooler, it came awfully close to the high-end Ryzen 7 2700X at default speeds (though that was with our test PC’s 8GB of RAM, not the 16GB here). Second, it gives the Pyro Talon a huge advantage over its older rivals in the mid-range gaming PC space.

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For example, the PC Specialist Enigma K6 and Medion Erazer P4404 D only managed overall scores of 106 and 94 respectively, less than half of what the Pyro Talon achieved. Wired2Fire’s own Pyro Reactor comes close, with its Ryzen 5 1600X propelling it to 217 overall, but that costs a couple of hundred pounds more.

Gaming performance is less special, but still good – we’d expect nothing less from the GTX 1060 at this point. In Dirt Showdown, it easily put out 134fps at 1,920 x 1,080, as well as 99fps at 2,560 x 1,440 and 55fps at 3,840 x 2,160.
You’ll need to drop some settings to play tougher games at high resolutions, though. In Metro: Last Light Redux, the Pyro Talon’s 49fps at 1,920 x 1,080 was fine, but 28fps at 2,560 x 1,440 is a little low, and 12fps at 3,840 x 2,160 is unplayable. Luckily, the cuts don’t have to be deep: we got 54fps at 1440p with the simple change of disabling SSAA, and at 4K resolution, the game looks good at 51fps with Medium quality and SSAA turned off.

This PC can also be used quite comfortably for virtual reality, scoring a fairly high 7.7 in Valve’s SteamVR Performance Test.

However, the competition is a lot fiercer when taken on GPU power alone. The Enigma K6 and Erazer P4404 D are both more or less even in both games, despite being cheaper than the Pyro Talon. It’s clear that the Ryzen chip is the star here, as while the GTX 1060 is inarguably up to the task of high-quality gaming, it’s not remotely the main reason to consider buying this system.

The Pyro Talon does have another high point, in the form of its storage. No settling for a simple hard disk or hybrid SSHD here: you get both a spacious hard disk and a nippy SSD. It’s worth pointing out, too, that the latter is the Samsung 860 Eva. A run through the AS SSD benchmark recorded a sequential read speed of 521MB/s and a sequential write speed of 479MB/s; we’ve seen the 860 Evo go even faster in other tests and conditions, but these are still very good results.

Being a microATX-based system has its benefits, mainly allowing for a smaller, more space-conscious case, although these are rarely as flexible or as upgradable as a full-size ATX PC. There’s only one PCI-E x16 slot, two PCI-E x1 slots, one 2.5in drive bay and two 3.5in drive bays, and of these, only one PCI-E x1 and one 3.5in bay are free to use. The motherboard provides an M.2 slot and four RAM slots (two left free), however, so it’s not entirely without useful features.

Furthermore, it has a fairly well-equipped rear 1/0 panel, with four USB 3 ports and two USB 3.1 ports, with another USB 2 and USB 3 port each at the front. There are no fancy audio outputs or included Wi-Fi cards, but the basics are all here, such as Gigabit Ethernet and HDMI, DisplayPort and DVI video outputs.

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Wired2Fire Pyro Talon review: Verdict

There are cheaper GTX 1060 systems, should gaming be your focus, but having this much processing power for less than £900 is hard to pass up; it’s certainly worth stretching to instead of the £779 Enigma K6. That said, this is the first second-generation Ryzen PC we’ve had in the labs, so perhaps it’s best to wait a few weeks and see if there are any other great AMD PCs coming, even if the Pyro Talon is going to be a hard act to follow.