PC Specialist Vanquish Elite 560 review

PC Specialist’s Vanquish Elite 560 is built around the stylishly minimal Cooler Master Elite 310 case, which should fit in wherever you choose to put it. The Vanquish Elite 560 might not seem particularly powerful from the outside, but it contains an overclocked Ivy Bridge Core i5 processor and dedicated Nvidia graphics.

Its Core i5-3570K runs at 4.4Ghz and is paired with 8GB of RAM. In practice, this helped it finish our multimedia benchmarks with an overall score of 143. Four physical cores make this chip ideal for heavily multithreaded applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Premiere.

Its graphics performance was equally impressive, depsite the Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 TI graphics card already being a generation old. It coped well in our Dirt3 test, reaching a perfectly playable 60.5fps, but Crysis 2 was a tougher challenge. An average of 24.9fps is still respectable, as the Crysis engine is more playable at lower frame rates than other games, but it’s far from the 60fps needed for perfectly smooth gameplay. If you value that above all else, you’ll have to sacrifice detail settings or lower the screen resolution for brand new games.

From the outside, the Vanquish Elite 560 looks fairly basic, with a glossy plastic front fascia that attracts fingerprints. The front I/O panel is located at the bottom of the case, which could make it difficult to reach if you stand it on the floor. Two USB ports and two 3.5mm audio jacks are all you get, although PC Specialist has fitted a multiformat card reader in one of the external 3.5in drive bays. It’s got an extra USB port, too, which should be easier to reach. One of the four external 5.25in bays is filled with a Blu-ray optical drive, leaving three others empty for additional upgrades.

Internally, the Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard has room for several upgrades, including three PCI slots, one spare PCI-Express x16 slot and two PCI-E x1 slots, although you’ll have to remove the dual-slot graphics card to use both at once. Two unoccupied memory slots let you add more RAM if required and there are four SATA ports for connecting hard disks, too. With a 1TB hard disk in the top 3.5in drive bay, there are a further five empty bays, which means you won’t run out of space for storage.

Cooling is fairly basic, with just one 120mm front intake and one 120mm exhaust. The Titan CPU cooler is, ironically, rather compact, but it managed to stay quiet even under heavy load. You can use the mounting point on the side panel to fit an additional 80mm, 90mm or 120mm fan. Cables are secured away from sources of airflow, but you need to take a pair of scissors to the plastic ties if you want to rearrange them.

PC Specialist offers the Vanquish Elite 560 with an AOC E2450SWDA monitor. It’s a Full HD panel, with an LED backlight that helps produce natural colours. There’s not much in the way of adjustment, and you only get VGA and DVI inputs, but it’s still a welcome inclusion. The base unit also comes with a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard, which are a welcome step up from the basic desktop sets we’ve seen from other system builders.

The Vanquish Elite 560is a well-built machine with a hefty overclock, which only just loses out to the similarly priced competition, such as the Palicomp Alpha Excite due to its slightly smaller hard disk. Even so, it’s still great value.