Performance Analysis

The power of the components in this rig are pretty well known by now, so we needn’t dwell on them for too long. The GTX 1070 delivers great frame rates at 1080p and 1440p – even in one of the most demanding titles, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, it is consistently smooth. In most other games it will be much faster still, especially as it’s being fed by a 5GHz Core i7-8700K. Its credentials in VR are also excellent, so this system would make a great companion for a Vive or Rift.

The 5GHz 6c12t CPU delivers excellent results in HandBrake, and while AMD rules the roost in Cinebench, the Intel chip can still render fairly quickly. The PCMark 10 results draw on both CPU and GPU and are right where we’d expect them to be.

The 960 Evo has always been a great SSD to choose, but it’s been undermined here by being left running in PCIe 3.0 x2 mode rather than x4. To be fair, this doesn’t affect its real world performance in most cases, but it’s irksome nonetheless. This is something we’ve seen before on systems and is likely a silly default setting in the Asus BIOS, but it’s never good to have a component artificially bottlenecked like this – the sequential read speed should be over 3,000MB/s but is instead hovering around the 1,800MB/s mark.

With sub-500W power consumption under full load, the 650W PSU was clearly the right choice for this system.

Idle, the GPU fans turn off completely, and while there are nine 120mm fans elsewhere, they are controlled by PWM, so total noise output isn’t too loud. You will hear them ramp up once the system is placed under heavy CPU load, and the hefty overclock saw CPU temperatures hit over 90°C even with the large all-in-one cooler – this was in a lab that was very warm, though (nearly 30°C!). The frequency never faltered, though, so the cooling setup is well matched to the components. The mighty Strix cooler, meanwhile, barely breaks a sweat during gaming and keeps the GTX 1070 cool and boosting high.

Conclusion

A few silly errors on AWD-IT’s part mean we can’t give a complete assessment of the Narcissus from a true end-user perspective. This is a shame, as in many ways it’s a great system. The Corsair and Asus hardware selections do carry a price premium, but the end result is a unique and great looking system once you have the RGB lighting tuned to your liking. The custom cables and professional tidying job help here as well, and we like that the overclock on the CPU has been carefully applied and was rock steady throughout testing.

However, there are problems too. The disconnected fan cable, the SSD running at half speed, and the lack of a saved BIOS profile all indicate that just a bit more conscientiousness is needed – after all, AWD-IT is asking for £2,000 here. Speaking of, this turns out to be pretty good value for the components here. A quick tally up on a popular etailer got us to over £2,050, and that’s before you take into consideration the cost of time for building and overclocking the PC, and it doesn’t include the system-wide warranty.

AWD-IT has done the critical things right: bring together premium components that complement each other nicely and offer them with a good warranty for a great price. It just needs a little extra TLC, and it’ll really be onto a winning formula.