CCL Paladin

VERDICT Another strong showing for Ryzen’s 3rd gen, with strong graphics and acres of storage space

THE SECOND OF this month’s Ryzen 7 3700X desktops is the CCL Paladin. Like the Chillblast Fusion Axion, it matches the Ryzen 7 processor with all-in-one water-cooling, an up-to-date X570 motherboard, 16GB of RAM and a powerful gaming GPU. This time, however, it doesn’t even come close to the £2,000 mark.

Not that it’s a cheap PC, but the relatively low cost of the Radeon RX 5700 XT (next to the Fusion Axion’s GeForce RTX 2080) undoubtedly helps keep the price down. As we saw from its standalone review (Shopper 380), the RX 5700 XT is a comfortable 1440p graphics card and can even have a fair crack at 4K – qualities that are on show here as well.

CONFIDENCE GAME

In Dirt Showdown, it was never far behind the Fusion Axion, averaging 185fps at 1,920x1,080, 180fps at 2,560x1,440 and 112fps at 3,840x2,160. This isn’t a terribly taxing game, but those are still sky-high scores, and encouragingly shows that even a CPU-reliant game such as Dirt isn’t bottlenecked or otherwise held back by the AMD chip. Previous Ryzens weren’t quite as good as their Intel counterparts for gaming, but that looks to have changed.