PCSpecialist Topaz Supreme

An all-AMD system that offers terrific value for money and plenty of power in a chunky chassis

- TIM DANTON

SCORE 5/5

PRICE £749 (£899 inc VAT) from pcspecialist.co.uk/reviews

Forget the expense of the HP Omen 45L (see p50) or Chillblast Apex the PCSpecialist Topaz Supreme is all about value. That doesn't mean cheap, it doesn't mean nasty. It means every penny you're spending is designed to deliver the maximum return possible in terms of performance.

It all starts with the AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor. The first thing that strikes you on powering up Windows is that everything snaps to attention, and so it should because this is using AMD's latest Zen 4 architecture. The only area where the 7600 will fall behind more expensive processors is when you're using the PC for a task that exploits multiple threads. There are six performance cores and 12 threads here, which is why its multicore scores of 11,569 in Geekbench 6 and 13,541 in Cinebench R23 were around half that of the HP Omen 45L. But for one-fifth of the price.

To see a better reflection of day-to-day speed, look at the PCMark 10 result. Here, the PCSpecialist scored 8,672 to the HP's 9,585. Even if you compare their Digital Content Creation scores, it's hardly light years apart at 13,386 versus 17,100. It helps that PCSpecialist opts for a speedy 1TB SSD, which returned average sequential reads of 5,192MB/sec and reads of 3,908MB/sec.