Overclockers XVI Gamer

VERDICT A good all-rounder, but in exchange for slightly less power you can get a much better deal

- James Archer

£200 CAN GO a long way in PC building. This is well known to anyone who’s attempted a DIY system: it can upgrade the graphics card to a whole other tier, it can massively boost storage capacity and speed, and it can get you a CPU with significantly more cores and multitasking muscle.

However, spread that £200 too thinly, and what initially seems like a major overhaul can end up feeling less worthwhile than if you’d focused on making just one or two key upgrades. This is precisely what’s happened with the Overclockers XVI Gamer: at £900, it’s £200 more than the Gaming XVI Essential (Shopper 377), and is inarguably a more powerful and better-equipped system. Whether it’s worth the extra cash, however, is a different matter.

COMPARE NOTES First, a rundown of what’s different between the two PCs, and what stays the same. The most notable non-change is that both have AMD’s hexa-core Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, although since the XVI Gamer has 16GB of RAM – twice that of the Gaming XVI Essential – it should have the edge on multithreaded performance. Both systems also have a 240GB SATA SSD as their main storage drive, with a 1TB hard disk providing backup capacity.

Here, graphics power is drawn from the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti, a direct – if minor – step up from the Gaming XVI Essential’s GTX 1660. Both GPUs have 6GB of GDDR6 memory, but the GTX 1660 Ti has the advantage in core count, with 1,536 to the GTX 1660’s 1,408.