Fresh Tech Solutions 1080 Titan PC Review

Performance Analysis

The gaming performance of this system is hard to fault. After all, it's using the world's fastest single GPU; the GTX 1080 is simply as fast as it gets at the moment. It offers excellent 1440p performance and makes a solid go at 4K as well. If this latter resolution is your target, you may have to dial down some settings, but it's still your best bet. The 1080 Titan PC should also be well positioned to tackle VR content.

The speedy CPU sees the system achieve great results in PCMark 8, where it keeps pace with the PC Specialist Define X1 that uses a Core i7-6700K. However, in the more heavily threaded rendering workloads, the HyperThreading of the Core i7-6700K comes into play and gives PC Specialist the lead. These are very specific workloads, however – for general purpose computing, gaming and a bit of light image and video editing the Core i5-6600K here will serve you just as well and save you a bit of cash too.


The power consumption figures are very good, as you'd expect from any system that combines a Skylake CPU with a Pascal graphics card. At a peak power consumption of just under 350W, there's easily headroom for another GTX 1080 if you ever want one. In the meantime, the 700W PSU will be operating close to its peak efficiency, so it's a sensible PSU choice overall. The overclock settings, however, are such that the CPU is always running at 4.5GHz, which does push up the idle power consumption a little.

The CrystalDiskMark results aren't amazing, showing a slight weakness in sequential writes and in random performance compared to most other SATA SSDs. This actually does appear to have a small real-world impact too, with the PCMark 8 storage traces being noticeably worse than the majority of other systems we've seen. The PC Specialist system with its NVMe SSD has clear advantages here.

Although it's a powerful cooler, able to keep the CPU at around 70°C even on an especially warm day, the H80i V2 is pretty loud. Even when the system is idle, the fan profile Fresh Tech implemented had the two fans running at 1,300-1,400 RPM, making them easily the loudest and most distracting part of the system. Switching to the pre-made Quiet profile did lower the fans to a more pleasing 1,000 RPM or so in idle situations, and you can also make your own profiles easily enough. Under load, the fans approach the 2,000 RPM mark and are really quite noisy, and they seem to stay at a high speed for quite a while even when you go back to being idle. Again, you can limit their speed easily enough, but the out-of-box noise situation isn't great, which is a shame as the system, GPU and PSU fans didn't appear to be very loud.

Conclusion

Tallying up the cost of this system's components, we arrived at a figure close to £1,500 – the GTX 1080 Founders Edition alone costs over £600, after all. As such, buying this system from Fresh Tech Solutions actually results in a significant saving, plus you get a three year warranty with decent terms, a guaranteed CPU overclock and a ready-made system delivered to your door.

With Fresh Tech able to demonstrate such good value again, there's clearly potential in this system. Most of the components are solid choices as well, and as a result this is a great system for high resolution or VR gaming and it has plenty of features. However, even with this in mind there are a few too many slip ups and concerns for us to be able to recommend it. The chassis is lacking in build quality, for example, and there are a couple of clashes in the colour scheme. SSD performance, while not terrible, does lag behind the competition, and system noise also proved to be a bit too much, although you do at least get very good control over the CPU cooler via Corsair Link, allowing you to remedy this with relative ease. Finally, there's the misalignment of the optical drive, which is frankly sloppy and definitely not something we should be seeing in a system like this.

Again, Fresh Tech's value for money and its choice of hardware (in most instances) are hard to argue with. However, we'd like to see a little more care taken in a few areas, and the ability to configure the system further online would be a nice touch too. PC Specialist's Define X1 will cost you £100 more, but it still represents a saving given the more advanced components inside and it remains our choice for a ready-made GTX 1080 gaming PC.