VERDICT A plush PC that values versatility over the very best performance.
SHINY AND EXPENSIVE, the Vulcan Elite S is a reminder of what PC luxury can look like without tipping into outright ridiculousness. Everything save for the Wi-Fi antenna is housed inside an enormous Cooler Master MasterCase H500M chassis, with tempered glass side panels and twin 200mm intake fans, and the whole system is dripping with RGB LEDs, from the fans and motherboard to the RAM sticks and AIO watercooler pump.
The key internals are all high end: there’s a hexa-core Intel Core i7-8700K processor, an 8GB GeForce GTX 1070 Ti graphics card and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Even if it’s not all quite top of the range – the CPU is only running at stock speeds, and the GTX 1070 Ti is third in the GeForce 10-series hierarchy – we had high hopes for performance.
These were realised about as well as they could have been, especially in the CPU-heavy 4K benchmarks. The Core i7-8700K may not come overclocked but the image test score of 163 it produced is seriously high, a testament to the CPU’s single-core muscle. Scores of 236 in the video test and 276 in the multitasking test, resulting in an overall score of 244, are also enough for occasional media editing.
CARD SHARK
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