Steiger Dynamics LEET Pure Home Theatre PC Review

With a fairly meaty CPU up front, the LEET Pure was unsurprisingly near the top of our benchmarks in every 2D test. It's Core i7-4770K is certainly going to be a match for any video or photo editing you do and needless to say we haven't bothered seeing if it can stream HD video content from the likes of Netflix - something that even a Core i3 could handle comfortably. Overall, its score of 2,448 was second only to Intel's Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition and the results of the Core i3-4130 and AMD A10-6800K go to show that if you do intend to carry out more demanding tasks, the Core i7-4770K is going to offer a lot more speed.


In our game tests, the LEET Pure was more than capable of handling 1080p at high settings, not dropping below a minimum of 40fps in Battlefield 4 and 50fps in Crysis 3 - there's clearly scope here for upping the ante but as we've seen in our various ultra HD testing, 4K gaming isn't going to be doable on a single GeForce GTX 770 2GB. If you want to compare your system at home, the result in Unigine's Valley 1.0 benchmark at 1,920 x 1,080 with default high settings was 3,973.

The system drew 330W under our maximum load test using Prime95 and Unigine Valley, with this dropping to 66W at idle. The system proved to be extremely quiet indeed, even under load, with just a gentle thrum coming from the H80i's pump and the hard disk has sensibly been set to power down after a period of inactivity to cut noise while streaming or playing music. As we suspected, the PSU fan didn't even spin up until we fired up our full-load stress tests. The cooling hardware did a good enough job of keeping the temperatures within reasonable limits, too, with our full-load tests resulting in a CPU delta T of 58°C and a GPU delta T of 56°C.


Conclusion

As with all premium systems, there's an element of excess here both in size, features and cost that those of us with small, budget-conscious HTPCs will either aspire to or loath with a passion. However, its easy to forget that cases like this are actually fairly popular despite their high price, and with the case alone retailing from Steiger Dynamics for around £500 or $799, the system asking price suddenly looks a lot more reasonable given there's a liquid-cooled mid-range PC inside too. However, the LEET Pure system we have here feels a little like a blank canvas.

It's waiting to be tweaked and added to with all-manner of HTPC-related software and hardware, some of which is available straight from Steiger Dynamics themselves such as TV tuner cards and WMC remotes. While our sample can't play games at 4K, its GeForce GTX 770 2GB graphics card can certainly play back 4K video content via its DisplayPort if you're lucky enough to own a 4K TV. Of course, with the addition of a second GPU, 4K gaming is very much a possibility - something both the Xbox One and PS4 currently lack, and with 4K TVs dropping in price all the time, Steiger Dynamics' systems could find a new niche for themselves.

The case is sublime, if a little on the large side, but then it can easily twilight as a home server too, dishing out content around the home with no worries about the CPU becoming overloaded like you might with a NAS box. It's great to see a company pushing the boat out when it comes to HTPCs, and with a customised case, quiet operation and plenty of options to choose from in its configurator, if you have the cash, Steiger Dynamics offers the most extreme HTPC we've ever seen.

*Update*
Steiger Dynamics was keen to point out that it has a new range of systems and a revamped version of its Couch Master gaming peripheral support, both of which will be announced at CES this month.