Performance Analysis

In games the Stormforce Crystal GTX1660Ti performed similarly to the Core i7-8700K and GTX 1070 Ti combination in CyberpowerPC's RGB Infinity GTX, which cost £800 more just over a year ago, although admittedly it did have a more potent cooling, storage, and audio. The difference was just 3fps at 1,920 x 1,080 in Deus Ex and just 1fps on the minimum frame rate at 2,560 x 1,440, with this system hitting minimums of 51fps and 36fps respectively. This is a tough game to run, so managing 36fps at 1440p bodes well for decent performance at this resolution in other tough titles too. Just for a laugh we ramped the game up to 4K and here it still managed a respectable 27fps minimum. Only in the 3DMark and VRMark tests did the GTX 1070 Ti machine have a noticeable lead in 3D performance, most likely boosted by the CPU portion of those benchmarks.

The six-core Ryzen CPU performed well in our content creation tests, bettering the Core i5-8400 of the PC Specialist Enigma Elite in HandBrake and a huge amount quicker than the Core i5-7400 quad-core used in the PC Specialist Enigma K5 we looked at a while back - it's great to see such a shift in performance from a PC for around £1,000 in under 18 months. Only much more expensive CPUs such as Intel's Core i7-9700K used in the PC Specialist Vortex Ultima R offer significantly more performance, and the same was true for the photo editing test as well as Cinebench - the Ryzen 5 2600 punches above its weight here.

We don't see many 2.5" SSD-equipped systems come through our lab and even fewer sporting a low-end model such as the WD Green, and this did result in some of the lowest storage results we've seen from a modern system. Read and write speeds of 476MB/s and 396MB/s respectively are reasonable and certainly still better than a hard disk, but we've seen other PCs include faster NVMe SSDs while retailing for the same price. In the PCMark 8 storage trace tests, it performed similarly to the PC Specialist Enigma K5's combination of Intel Optane Memory and hard disk, but it was clearly bottlenecked in these benchmarks compared to other systems with faster storage.

With an ambient temperature of 24°C, the CPU hit 81°C in our stress test, which is acceptable but reaffirms our thoughts about zero overclocking headroom - stock cooling is referred to as such for a reason. The GPU temperature of 66°C was far more impressive, as that's a long way from throttling, and the card remained relatively quiet too - certainly much more so than some of the single fan coolers we've seen on GTX 1660 Tis recently. Unlike the CPU, there's potentially some overclocking headroom there too.

Conclusion

We'll start with the good points first, and thankfully there are plenty of them. Stormforce has shoehorned Nvidia's GTX 1660 Ti into a £1,000 system, and as a result it punches above its weight in games, offering decent performance even at 2,560 x 1,440, plus AMD's Ryzen 5 2600 is one of the best-value multi-threaded all-rounders at the moment. The warranty is excellent too, with three years of hassle-free ownership covered. Overclockers UK offers this as standard for its systems, but then it is a retail giant owned by the behemoth that is Caseking. PC Specialist is one of the larger UK system integrators, meanwhile, and even it charges £135 extra for its Platinum warranty which matches the one here for terms, so you shouldn't take it lightly. With that in mind, the £100 or so premium charged compared to buying the system in separate parts is acceptable (plus you get a copy of The Division 2, if that's your thing). Importantly, the system is also built cleanly and professionally, although we admit the complexity of it is very low.

Regarding downsides, there are quite a few component choices that we'd ideally do differently, such as making the memory faster, having more or faster primary storage, picking a faster Wi-Fi card that won't bottleneck the faster Internet packages, and having a better cooler with an overclock to match. We're not expecting all of these things to be addressed by Stormforce for the same cash, but it could certainly do with introducing some basic component customisation options so that competent customers could pick and choose what's most important to them. As it stands, the fixed selection here is acceptable but only just.

Still, we can't deny the solid performance in games, the tidy build, and the stellar warranty. Combined, these factors mean that if DIY is not your thing and solid performance and peace of mind are higher priorities, we can definitely recommend the Stormforce Crystal GTX 1660Ti.