Fresh Tech Solutions Ultimate Collection 6600K Falcon R Review

Fresh Tech Solutions 6600K Falcon R Review

Manufacturer: Fresh Tech Solutions
UK price (as reviewed): £1,049 (inc VAT)
US price (as reviewed): N/A

As a relative newcomer to bit-tech's pool of system builders we've covered in PC reviews, Fresh Tech Solutions has started out pretty well with its Ultimate Collection 6700K PC netting a Recommended award a few weeks ago. We're dropping down the price range of its PCs today and looking at the 6600K Falcon R - a £1,000 PC that packs a decent punch in pretty much all areas.


To start with though, keen-eyed readers will likely have the same initial reaction we had to the choice case - we didn't recognise it either, and that's not often a good sign. The case in question is the Game Max Falcon and while not having had experience of the brand before, we were actually quite impressed. It's not particularly attractive, but sports plenty of ventilation, a PSU cover, good cable routing and even a two-channel fan controller, removable dust filters and side window too. Fresh Tech Solutions has done a good job of cable tidying and the case does equally well at hiding the cables in the first place with a rear-mounted SSD and PSU cover hiding the rest of the spaghetti.


Fresh Tech Solutions has kitted the case out with four 120mm red LED fans, all hooked up to the fan controller, and with the two additional fans strapped to the Corsair H80i v2 all-in-one liquid cooler too, that's a total of six fans included, which should mean that airflow and cooling won't be major issues. Surprisingly, there's also an optical drive - we haven't seen one of these in a PC for a while, but it does help to break up the front panel and at least the colour matches the case.


At the heart of the PC sits a Gigabyte Z170-Gaming K3 motherboard, which did well in our recent review, and this has overclocked the included Core i5-6600K to 4.6GHz. The PC is aimed at 1080p/1440p gaming thanks to its Zotac GTX 970 graphics card and should be able to deal with ultra wide QHD resolutions too although 4K will be out of reach unless you drop the settings significantly.


Storage is provided by a single Samsung SSD 850 Evo 250GB - a good choice for a PC at this price, which is backed up by a 1TB Western Digital hard disk, while the system uses a hefty 16GB of 3,000MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR4 memory and an RM750x PSU, which obviously has plenty of headroom for dropping in more powerful graphics cards. The system includes Windows 10 Home edition and a three-year warranty comprising 1 year collect and return, with parts covered for two years and labour for three years.

Specifications

• CPU Intel Core i5-6600K (overclocked to 4.6GHz)
  
• CPU cores Four physical
  
• Memory 16GB (2 x 8GB) 3,000MHz Corsair Vengeance DDR4
  
• Graphics Zotac GTX 970 (1 x DVI-D, 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI)
  
• Storage 1 x 250GB Samsung SSD 850 Evo (OS), 1 x 1TB 7,200rpm Western Digital hard disk
  
• Motherboard Gigabyte Z170 Gaming K3
  
• PSU Corsair RM750x
  
• Optical Drive Samsung 24x DVD-RW
  
• Cooling Corsair H80i V2, 4 x 120mm case fans
  
• Case / Dimensions (mm) Game Max Falcon / 202 x 473 x 505 (W x D x H)
  
• Networking Gigabit LAN
  
• Audio 8-channel Realtek ALC1150 (onboard)
  
• Operating system Windows 10
  
• Audio and USB Ports 6 x SATA 6Gbps via Intel Z170, 2 x SATA Express, 1 x M.2 PCI-E 3.0 x4 (up to 22110), 2 x USB 3.1 Type-A, 6 x USB 3.0 (2 x via header), 4 x USB 2.0 (4 x via header), 1 x LAN, audio out, line in, mic
• Warranty 3 years (1 year collect and return, 2 years parts, 3 years labour