Featuring a Coffee Lake CPU, a 10th generation NVIDIA GPU and a beautiful chassis, we take a look at the Cobalt Gaming system from Overclockers.co.uk.
Product on Review: Cobalt Overclocked Gaming PC
Manufacturer: Overclockers.co.uk
Street Price: £1009.94 (review model)
Overclockers.co.uk has sent over the OCUK Gaming Cobalt system for us to take a look at. The system is built inside the Phanteks Eclipse P300 chassis and features an enormous overclock to the Core i3-8350K CPU, running at 4.8GHz. There’s also 8GB of 3000MHz DDR4 memory and a GTX1060 graphics card to help push those frames in your favourite gaming titles.
The Phanteks case features RGB lighting as standard, both inside and outside the case, with the power button featuring a small ring of LED goodness. There’s also a huge tempered glass panel to show off the internals of your system.
Overclockers put a lot of faith into its machines, offering a 3 year, collect, repair and return warranty with each system.
The model we’re looking at today arrives with a price tag that’s just north of £1000. Does this kind of system represent the best possible value at the £1000? That’s what we aim to find out.
Overclockers.co.uk on the Cobalt Gaming
The OcUK Gaming Cobalt is a great value, configurable gaming PC based around an Overclocked Quad Core Core i3 8350K Processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 10 series graphics! Hand-built, hand-tuned and tested by our highly trained technicians, the OcUK Gaming range uses only our finest components to match aesthetic brilliance with epic performance!
Technical Specifications
Case Phanteks P300 Glass Midi Tower – Black
Power Supply 550W 80Plus Bronze Rated PSU
CPU Intel Core i3 8350K @ 4.7GHz Quad Core Processor
Motherboard Intel Z370 (Socket 1151) DDR4 Motherboard
Cooler Alpenfohn Brocken Eco 120mm Tower CPU Cooler
Memory 8GB DDR4 3000MHz Dual Channel Kit
Primary Solid State Drive Samsung 850 Evo 250GB 2.5″ SATA Sold State Drive
Secondary Solid State Drive Optional
Storage Hard Drive Seagate 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Graphics Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
Wirelress Networking Optional
Audio 7.1 High Definition Audio
Operating System Microsoft Windows 10 64 Bit
Power Supply 550W 80Plus Bronze Rated PSU
CPU Intel Core i3 8350K @ 4.7GHz Quad Core Processor
Motherboard Intel Z370 (Socket 1151) DDR4 Motherboard
Cooler Alpenfohn Brocken Eco 120mm Tower CPU Cooler
Memory 8GB DDR4 3000MHz Dual Channel Kit
Primary Solid State Drive Samsung 850 Evo 250GB 2.5″ SATA Sold State Drive
Secondary Solid State Drive Optional
Storage Hard Drive Seagate 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Graphics Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GDDR5 Graphics Card
Wirelress Networking Optional
Audio 7.1 High Definition Audio
Operating System Microsoft Windows 10 64 Bit
Packaging & Bundle
The packaging can only really be regarded as “bomb proof”. There’s an outer packaging which comprises of solid cardboard caps and triple corrugated cardboard, all bound together with strapping.
Inside that box, and the cardboard buffers, is the box for the Phanteks Eclipse P300 mid-tower case within which the entire system has been re-packaged for transit. Overclockers have used an expanding package to secure the internal components.
We can say with absolute certainty that something would have to go catastrophically wrong during the delivery process for anything untoward to occur to the system.
In terms of a bundle, there’s nothing included apart from a power lead for the system.
Closer Look
The machine has been built inside the beautiful Phanteks Eclipse P300 chassis. The tempered glass panel shows off the excellent cable work and humungous CPU cooler. The rest of the case, upon first inspections, is sleek and unassuming, there’s some small intake vents but other than that, everything is kept minimalistic.
The front of the chassis is basic, with only some vents at the top and bottom to intake cool air.
On top of the Phanteks case are a couple of USB 3.0 ports, a pair of 3.5mm audio jacks, an RGB lighting controller and the power button, complete with an RGB lighting ring.
On the rear we find a single 120mm exhaust fan, along with plenty of input and output options. On the motherboard there’s a combined PS2 keyboard and mouse port, a DVI and HDMI for on-board graphics output, a solitary USB 3.1 Gen. 2 Type-C port, 6x USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-A ports and a Gigabit Ethernet port. Audio is dealt with via the 3x 3.5mm audio jacks.
On the GTX 1060 6GB graphics card, we have a pair of Display Port outputs along with a pair of HDMI and a single DVI.
The 550W 80+ Bronze PSU is located under a shroud at the bottom of the case, facing downwards to draw cool air from outside without relying on warm air from the case. There’s a removable dust filter to help look after the PSU.
Closer Look (Internals)
For access inside the case, it’s as simple as removing four thumb screws, one in each corner. We can immediately see that the wire routing and cable management has been done properly, allowing optimal airflow through the case to keep that overclocked Intel Core i3-8350K CPU and the ASUS GPU as cool as possible.
Overclockers have equipped the Core i3-8350K CPU, overclocked to a whopping 4.8GHz, with an Alpenfohn Brocken Eco 120mm cooler. The cooler features 4 large heatpipes and ample surface area to keep an i3 cool, despite the huge overclock.
Alongside the CPU is 8GB of DDR4 from TEAMGROUP, clocked at 3000MHz. There’s a couple of spare DIMM slots to upgrade to 16GB once DRAM prices normalises somewhat.
The motherboard chosen to enable this entire system is the ASUS TUF Z370-Plus Gaming motherboard. This features plenty of future-proofing in the way of a pair of M.2 slots and 6x SATA 3 ports as well as the previously mentioned empty DIMM slots.
The ASUS GTX 1060 6GB features a reference “blower-style” cooler, to help exhaust heat out of the back of the case instead of relying on case fans to remove the heat from many after-market coolers. The 6GB of GDDR5 memory paired with 1280 stream processors will plough it’s way through games at 1080p resolutions, with 1440p being an option also. There’s ample space between the large CPU cooler and the GPU to prevent any heat-soak between the two components.
You will also notice the white strip stuck to the front of the case, this is controlled from the motherboard and produces a range of RGB effects within the case.
We mentioned the PSU behind the shroud at the bottom being a 550w, bronze-efficiency rated PSU from Cougar, which is capable of providing more than enough juice for a system of this calibre. Also located under the shroud is a 256GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD and a 1TB Seagate HDD for storage.
A short video clip to demonstrate the RGB lighting inside the case.
Benchmarks: Temperatures & Boot Time
For our first benchmark test we observe the max. CPU/GPU temperatures of the system while allowing Unigine Heaven 4.0 to run on a 30-minute loop. To report back on the temperatures we use RealTemp and GPU-Z which provide the peak figures.
In this test we observe how fast the boot into Windows 10 is by using a digital stopwatch.
Benchmarks: Cinebench R15 & Handbrake
CINEBENCH can measure systems with up to 64 processor threads. This test scene contains approximately 2,000 objects which in turn contain more than 300,000 polygons in total, and uses sharp and blurred reflections, area lights, shadows, procedural shaders, antialiasing, and much more. The result is displayed in points (pts). The higher the number, the faster your processor is.
Benchmarks: PC Mark 8 & 10
PCMark 10 combines performance benchmarking with battery life measurement and includes tests based on popular Adobe and Microsoft applications. Whether you are looking for long battery life, or maximum power, PCMark 10 will help you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance for your needs. It’s the complete PC performance benchmark for home and business.
Benchmarks: 3DMark & Heaven 4.0
Time Spy is a DirectX 12 benchmark test for gaming PCs running Windows 10. With its pure DirectX 12 engine, built from the ground up to support new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal benchmark for testing the DirectX 12 performance of the latest graphics cards.
Benchmarks: Gaming (1080p)
The Cobalt Gaming System uses the NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB for graphics delivery, in this section we test the latest gaming titles, at a 1080p (1920 x 1080) resolution to see how effective the 3D capabilities are. We report on the average framerate using FRAPS.
Benchmarks: Gaming (1440p)
The Cobalt Gaming System uses the NVIDIA GTX 1060 6GB for graphics delivery, in this section we test the latest gaming titles, at a 1440p (2560 x 1440) resolution to see how effective the 3D capabilities are. We report on the average framerate using FRAPS.
Conclusion
Overclockers have moved on leaps and bounds in recent years, offering a vast range of products from their comprehensive website. The systems they’re now producing seem to mirror this, offering excellent value that only a PC retailer could offer. We looked at the Cobalt Gaming equipped with a 6GB GTX 1060, arriving at £1009. We tallied up the individual cost on the OcUK website to find very little parity between the two amounts. Bearing in mind the considerable overclock pre-applied to the machine, and guaranteed stability at that, this machine genuinely offers excellent value as a gaming machine.The Intel Core i3-8350K, clocked at a whopping 4.8GHz, fired out a score of 812 in the Cinebench CPU test, almost rivalling the i7-7700K from the previous generation, while clearly dominating the i5-7600K. The OpenGL test further proved the gaming prowess of this CPU with a score of 170.79, beating any gaming CPU we’ve seen thus far.
OcUK’s inclusion of the GTX1060, alongside the i3 processor, is a very well thought out marriage within the Phanteks chassis. We was genuinely excellent framerates in all of our 1080p tests, with only Deus Ex struggling at 1440p – we didn’t hold back on the AA or Image Quality, either. Having a 6GB frame buffer obviously helped us out at this point, paired with the 1280 processor cores within the Pascal GPU.
The ASUS TUF Gaming motherboard provides a plethora of connectivity, including USB Type-C and six Type-A ports, as well as the internal upgrade options in the form of a pair of M.2 slots, a couple of empty DIMM slots and four spare SATA 3 ports.
We loved the Phanteks Eclipse P300 case. Tempered glass panels are becoming increasingly popular amongst the gaming community, with manufacturers now option for fancy heatsinks and black PCBs to make the internals of your PC look as beautiful as possible. The RGB lighting inside looks stunning late at night, especially with the majority of the internals being dark or neutral colours.
All things considered, the Cobalt Gaming system offers brilliant value, which you’d struggle to build yourself for the same cost. Cable management and any associated troubleshooting has been done for you, with a 3 year warranty included for peace of mind.
If you’re serious about gaming but feel put off by the thought of building a machine yourself, the Cobalt Gaming system offers all of the thrills without any of the spills.
Pros
+ Blinding performance at both 1080p and even 1440p
+ Excellent single-threaded CPU performance
+ Quiet under load
+ Expandable and upgradeable
+ Stylish chassis
+ Plentiful connectivity
+ RGB lighting
Neutral
+- Only 8GB of RAM
Cons
– None
+ Blinding performance at both 1080p and even 1440p
+ Excellent single-threaded CPU performance
+ Quiet under load
+ Expandable and upgradeable
+ Stylish chassis
+ Plentiful connectivity
+ RGB lighting
Neutral
+- Only 8GB of RAM
Cons
– None
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