Overclockers UK Titan Agent 47 Review

Performance Analysis

The R9 390X's dominance in the sub-£300 bracket was clear in our benchmarks - the likes of the GTX 970 were in a distant second place in some tests and it even had the better of the GTX 980 on occasion too as we can see at 4K with Utopia's Pandora, which used the Nvidia card, trailing by a small amount in Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3. The situation was reversed at 2,560 x 1,440 though.

Despite slower memory and a slightly slower overclock than some of the other systems we've looked at recently, the Titan Agent 47 fared quite well in the PCMark 8 tests. This can often be attributed to some CPU multiplier tweaks, but as it stands it was fastest in the photo editing test and second only to DinoPC's Troodon with its 4.7GHz Core i7-6700K in the video editing test. The Core i7 is still the CPU to go for if you'll be doing rendering, but again, the Overclockers UK system did better many other Core i5-6600K-based systems in Terragen 3.


The idle power draw was one of the highest on test - 87W - although that's only 20W or so more than the most power-frugal systems we've seen. The load power draw still leaves something to be desired thanks to the use of the AMD card - at 478W, this was more than the monstrous DinoPC Troodon, which sports a much faster CPU and a GTX 980 Ti. Still, it's only power and we doubt many reading this will be too concerned, especially as it's still below 500W.

The SSD's read speed was right up there at 537MB/sec, which is actually faster than the SSD's rated speed. However, we were expecting a slow write speed as well looking at its specs and with the OS and software installed, this was recorded at 166MB/sec, which is far from stellar looking at our graphs. Temperatures were fine as far as the CPU was concerned - a maximum delta T of 50°C is well away from the danger zone, but the GPU was regularly hovering in the mid 90's under sustained heavy load, where its fans did ramp up to quite a din and throttling did occur very occasionally in Unigine's Valley benchmark. This was a worse case scenario, though, and didn't occur in our game tests.

Conclusion

The Titan Agent 47 looks fantastic, has been made well and with plenty of attention to detail. NZXT's Manta isn't the smallest mini-ITX case going, but the system is still very compact compared to ATX towers that sport similar features. If you want to minimise your PC's footprint, be it on a desk or the floor, this kind of system is for you.

Specifications-wise, things are fairly solid. The graphics card is a tad noisy and hot-running, but it allows the system to perform better than a GTX 970-based one, for a similar price. The CPU overclock is a match for anything we've tested recently and the motherboard has plenty of room for expansion as well. The only fly in the ointment is the SSD. Its slow write speed and 10GB storage deficit compared to Samsung's offerings mean that using Overclockers UK's system configuration tool and swapping this out for a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo for just £6 is a no-brainer. Apart from that, if you're looking for a powerful mini-ITX gaming system for around £1,000, the Titan Agent 47 ticks plenty of boxes.