nearly two years ago we asked if there was a place in the
market for pre-built compact gaming pcs
like the digital storm bolt 3 and i guess given the rise of machines like
the Corsair 1 and MSI's trident well
it's safe to say that yes yes there is so when digital storm
called us up and offered to ship us their new bolt x for an exclusive early
look how could we say no
cooler masters 25th anniversary edition
cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel
check it out now at the link below
from the outside the bolt x is pretty similar to the bolt 3 we reviewed back
in 2015. it retains the clear edge to
edge acrylic side panel the strange placement of ventilation holes on the
other side panel and the separate upper panel where the 240 millimeter cooling
radiator hides like the bolt 3 the bolt x is available
in both the brushed aluminum fingerprint magnet finish of our older unit and the
shiny exotic paint finish of our bolt x
digital storm also lifted up the base of the case providing a little bit more
clearance for air intake on the bottom
one odd thing that you might have noticed by now is that there is no front
i o not even a power switch to accompany the
RGB front logo no digital storm instead
opted to put it on the side aesthetically this clean look works
really well for us but the option for our front optical
drive is also gone and whether cables
sticking out the front or out the side is best really depends on your desk
layout but enough boring stuff let's get inside it's impossible to miss the
immaculately run custom sleeved power cables and all hardline water cooling
setup with red dyed liquid to match the exterior
our unit has both the GPU and video card
water cooled which ended up giving us a bit of a surprise when we fired up our
benchmarks more on that later but it's also available in a less expensive CPU
only config there is no question that hardline looks
great mwah but as a tinkerer if i was buying a bolt
x i might not configure it this way for
a couple of reasons flexible tubing doesn't look as good i know but it gives
you quick and easy access for troubleshooting or upgrades while
hardline requires you to dismantle the whole loop in order to get at virtually
anything other than the RAM and drives
one saving grace with this particular machine though is that as long as you're
careful about it you actually could probably pull the whole assembly out
through the top panel so unlike the main gear omen x with hardline you could swap
a failed component like a motherboard without a plumbing certificate from the
local community college but we still think that the happy medium
is hardline for the CPU only
for easy graphics card upgrades in the future or soft tubing all around if you
want the extra performance and on that subject there's plenty of
that our ASUS rog strix z270i gaming is
equipped with an Intel core i7 7700k
and 32 gigs of ddr4 3000 RAM and as for
the GPU well that my friends is what a
water-cooled GeForce gtx 1080 ti looks
like and the whole thing is running off
a lienly 750 watt 80 plus platinum
modular power supply so then it should come as no surprise that even without
the five gigahertz factory overclock option our both x killed our 1080p
gaming test suite but what might be surprising is just how
well it killed it we gathered all of these results
at stock speeds for both the CPU and GPU
meaning that the performance difference over our test bench here was purely
driven by the efficiency of digital storms hydrolux water cooling loop
no part of our system ever dropped from max turbo which was
totally what i should have named my son
max turbo anyway sorry
even synthetic tests including a combined load of fermark and ida 64
didn't manage to make it throttle which is great results in a doomsday scenario
for any unified cooler and it doesn't really get terribly loud
while gaming either with the fan spinning up to a light whoosh under
normal loads and only really ramping up higher when under those synthetic loads
i mentioned before we wanted to give you accurate numbers
for the noise levels but unfortunately the studio is presently a construction
zone so yeah that's that's not happening
but bottom line is it worth the price tag well it's tough to say not because
we don't have the results or because we're
waffling on making a recommendation it's actually because we don't have a price
tag yet digital storm won't be releasing the bolt x to the public for another
couple of months and while the preliminary pricing that they've given
us says it will be starting at 1 500 us
dollars their starting configuration for the bolt 3 at that price suggests that a
bolt x as shown here will cost a pretty
penny more than that but maybe that's the point
what you'll be getting with the bolt x is a machine that absolutely crushes it
in terms of performance and with headroom for some overclocking thanks to
its excellent cooling setup it is far from the smallest gaming rig
we've ever seen it's even bigger than the last generation bolt but it's still
not unreasonable so if you've got the cash and you want a water cooled gaming
rig done right i think the bolt x has got you covered
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when you sign up at our link you'll even get 25 bucks in service credit or
towards a new device so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video
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