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Utopia Computers Ballista Review

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October 2, 2012 12 Min Read
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The Ballista from Utopia Computers is centred around the brand new FM2 APU line up from AMD, codenamed Trinity. How will it perform?


Product on Review: Utopia Ballista
Manufacturer and Sponsor: Utopia Computers
Street price: £749.99 inc. VAT (At time of review)

Who are Utopia Computers? You may not be familiar with them as they are a small, Scottish based company. However, they have been around since 1993 and are steadily becoming a popular computer systems and components etailer here in the UK. Their primary focus is to provide you with great value hardware and excellent customer service. In fact, they have been awarded as the winners of several categories in recent years:

2012 – PCR Awards WINNER, Best Service & Support
2012 – PCR Awards WINNER, Best Retail Experience
2011 – PCR Awards WINNER, Best UK Service & Support
2011 – Modern Apprenticeship in Customer Service PASSED
2010 – PCR Awards WINNER, Best UK Independent Retailer
2010 – Contribution to Education by East Ayrshire Council
2009 – PC Retail Awards FINALIST, Best UK Idependent Retailer

Today, we are going to be taking a look at the Ballista system from Utopia Computers, which built in a Silverstone Fortress FT03. It is a case which screams quality. The list of quality components does not end there. Utopia has used quality brands such as ASUS and Corsair for the all of the components. At the heart of the system is the new 5800K APU from AMD. It is overclocked to 4.4GHz from its standard speed of 3.8GHz.

The system itself has been assembled in a neat and tidy fashion. It has definitely had some time put into it to make sure that it is aesthetically pleasing when you take the side covers off. Utopia clearly understands that no-one likes unsightly cables and they have done their best to make sure that there is minimal cabling in the front of the case.

The choice of components is certainly interesting. Usually, you do not associate an AMD APU with expensive hardware as it is mainly for rigs that are built on a budget. However, with a case that costs over £100 on its own and a 120GB solid state drive, the costs quickly shoot up.



Utopia on Ballista
The Ballista features the new AMD 5800K which has an overclock applied to make your system operate at 4.4GHz whilst under load. The onboard 7660D on the APU is CrossFired with a discrete graphics card, the HD6670. The machine also features a Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD for quick boot times and responsive interaction with the system.

Technical Specifications

CPU AMD 5800K, 3.8GHz – overclocked to 4.4GHz
Cooling Coolit Eco Advanced liquid cooling system
Motherboard – ASUS F2 A85-M Pro (Socket FM2)
Memory Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz 2x4GB
Graphics ASUS HD 6770 1GB in CrossFire with the APU
Storage Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD & Seagate 1TB
Optical Sony Slot Loading DVDRW
PSU Corsair TX 550w Modular


Utopia Computers Ballista

A Closer Look


The Ballista comes packaged in the original Silverstone box which you would normally receive the case in. There was some extra padding added into the box to ensure that the system arrives on your doorstep safe and sound.

Whilst the accessories have not been shipped with our review sample, we would like to mention that you will receive them if you purchase this system. You will receive everything such as the motherboard manual(s), cabling, driver DVD(s), and the extra PSU cables which have not been included with our sample. Utopia has mentioned that you will also receive a document pack which is tailored to this PC.

The outside of the case has not been modified in any way. There are no stickers on it which leaves the system looking sleek and professional. The case is constructed of an aluminium outer shell and a steel body. As a result of using aluminium and steel, not only is the case light weight, it is also very sturdy. We have reviewed it previously here, if you are interested in our views on the case itself.



As mentioned in the introduction, only ASUS and Corsair products have been used for the majority of the components. It is nice to see that they have not taken a cheap route to try and maximise profit, but rather they have focused on providing quality. The CPU used in this build is the top of the line AMD Trinity chip, the 5800K. Both the motherboard and graphics card is produced by ASUS, which is a top notch brand by any PC builders standards. The motherboard is the ASUS F2 A85-M Pro which is ASUS’ current top of the line uATX offering for FM2. The graphics card is a 1GB HD 6770 which has been configured to be used in conjunction with the APU too. The RAM is produced by Corsair who have a proven track record of quality products. More specifically the kit that has been used is taking from the very popular Vengeance range and has a frequency speed of 1600MHz. Faster RAM would have been better suited as FM2 thrives on more bandwidth. RAM is becoming cheaper nowadays and 2133MHz would have been a much better choice for this system, due to the way it is configured. So for a slight bump in price it would be beneficial to change to 2133MHz. The power supply is overkill for this system but it allows for future graphics card upgrades; should you wish to do that. It is nice to see a Corsair unit being used again as they are well known for their reliability in this area also.

Inside the Ballista, you will notice that all of the cables have been neatly bundled together to make sure that there is minimal clutter in your system. All of the cables have been routed to the nearest hole in the motherboard tray and they have also been cable tied so that they are just the right length to reach whichever component the cable is for. It is apparent that both time and effort have been put into this system to ensure that it looks tidy before leaving Utopia Computers.



It is a similar story at the back of the motherboard tray. The cables have been bundled together with cable ties to make for a tidy appearance.



The Corsair Force 3 120GB is used as the boot drive for this system and a Seagate Barracuda 1TB drive is installed for as your storage drive. A “green” varient of any drive may have been a better choice as they would use less power, create less noise and run cooler.

Test Systems & Benchmarks


As the Ballista is preoverclocked, we compared it against our overclocked test rigs.

We will be comparing the Ballista to our test bench machines which feature the following components:

Utopia Computers Ballista: AMD Trinity 5800K @4.4GHz
CPU AMD 5800K, 3.8GHz – overclocked to 4.4GHz
Cooling Coolit Eco Advanced liquid cooling system
Motherboard – ASUS F2 A85-M Pro (Socket FM2)
Memory Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz 2x4GB
Graphics ASUS HD 6770 1GB in CrossFire with the APU
Storage Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD & Seagate 1TB
Optical Sony Slot Loading DVDRW
PSU Corsair TX 550w Modular


Custom Test Bench: AMD Phenom II 955 (OC), ASUS M5A99X EVO
CPU AMD Phenom II 955 @3806MHz (331×11.5)
Cooling Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard ASUS M5A99X EVO
Memory G.SKILL RipJawX DDR3-1866MHz CL9
Graphics Zotac GTX 570 1280MB
Storage Corsair Force F120
PSU FSP Aurum CM Series 750W


Custom Test Bench: AMD Bulldozer FX-8120 (OC), ASUS M5A99X EVO
CPU AMD FX-8120 Eight-Core Processor @3852MHz (335×11.5)
Cooling Noctua NH-D14
Motherboard ASUS M5A99X EVO
Memory G.SKILL RipJawX DDR3-1866MHz CL9
Graphics Zotac GTX 570 1280MB
Storage Corsair Force F120
PSU FSP Aurum CM Series 750W


To give you a variety of results and to best show how the system performs; we will be running the following benchmarks to give you a full perspective of how the system performs.

AIDA64 – CPU benchmarks
X264 HD 5.0.1 – 1st and 2nd pass encoding
SiSoftware Sandra 2012 – CPU and Memory benchmarks
CineBench 11.5 – CPU score
3DMark 11 – DX11 3D Performance and Extreme preset
Games – Crysis 2, DiRT Showdown, Skyrim and Sleeping Dogs

Benchmarks: AIDA64

This simple integer benchmark focuses on the branch prediction capabilities and the misprediction penalties of the CPU. It finds the solutions for the classic “Queens problem” on a 10 by 10 sized chessboard. At the same clock speed theoretically the processor with the shorter pipeline and smaller misprediction penalties will attain higher benchmark scores. For example – with HyperThreading disabled – the Intel Northwood core processors get higher scores than the Intel Prescott core based ones due to the 20-step vs. 31-step long pipeline. The CPU Queen test uses integer MMX, SSE2 and SSSE3 optimizations.








Benchmarks: CINEBENCH 11.5

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: SiSoftware SANDRA 2012

SANDRA isn’t always a benchmark that is included in hardware reviews but we believe it shouldn’t be ignored. SANDRA provides a vigorous package that tests your system in a rather large array of benchmarks. There are many aspects of benchmark that can be executed. We will be considering the CPU and memory tests.












Benchmarks: x264 HD 5.0.1

Simply put, this test measures how fast your machine can encode a short, DVD quality MPEG-2 video clip into a high-quality x264 video clip. What’s x264, you ask? It’s more or less the next-generation Xvid/DivX codec. We think it’s ideal for a benchmark because the application (x264.exe) reports fairly accurate compression results (in frames per second) for each pass of the video encoding process and it uses multi-core processors very efficiently




3D Benchmarks: 3DMark 11

Designed to measure your PC’s gaming performance 3DMark 11 makes extensive use of all the new features in DirectX 11 including tessellation, compute shaders and multi-threading. Trusted by gamers worldwide to give accurate and unbiased results, 3DMark 11 is the best way to consistently and reliably test DirectX 11 under game-like loads.




3D Benchmarks: Unigine Heaven 3.0

Unigine’s benchmark is to showcase the benefits of DX 11 and the use of tessellation as opposed to normal rendering techniques. The demo has impressive visuals that give an insight into what we can expect from gaming in the future.








Gaming Benchmarks: Crysis 2, DiRT Showdown, Skyrim & SleepingDogs

It’s important for us to perform a number of game benchmarks as well as the synthetic tests because it allows us to test the 3D performance. So here we have some popular titles, critically acclaimed and action-packed. FRAPS and in-house benchmarking tools were used to capture average FPS.









Conclusion


It’s time to draw this review to a close and give you our final verdict on Ballista.

Aesthetically, the system is a stunner. The finish on the case is great but it does attract finger prints very easily, which is not too much of an issue as they come off easily enough. Inside the case, the layout is very neat as mentioned during the review. The cables are all very neatly tied up and that makes minimal clutter within the system and also helps with airflow.

The system is preoverclocked to 4.4GHz from the standard speed of 3.8GHz. This is a nice increase in clock speeds but we can’t help but feel that a little more time should have gone into the overclocking of this system. All voltages were left on auto instead of manually adjusting them for the lowest stable voltages. We understand that there are time constraints but this would have been nice to see. Initial CPU voltages are under 100% load peak at 1.6v which settle down to around 1.48v after a short period of time.

In the review of the AMD 5600K APU, we demonstrated that there are obvious gains from using higher clocked memory. Whilst 1600MHz RAM is usually the sweet spot between price and performance for anyone looking to build or buy a system today, Trinity really does benefit from faster RAM. Up to 40% extra performance can be obtained just by using faster RAM. We don’t know how the 5800K will fare with RAM at 2400MHz (or faster) but we think it is safe to say that the performance gains will be fairly similar, if not greater.

The Ballista does generate some noise during idle and load usage but not enough to cause any concern or disturbance.

Ballista has been priced at £750 which is fairly steep considering the performance return of the system. The SilverStone FT03 is great choice but it bumps the price up considerably and perhaps an adjustment with the case would have helped with the value of this system. The cost of FT03 comes in at just under a seventh of the total cost of the system. Against our other test systems the Ballista did struggle during graphic orientated benchmarks but these systems are higher in spec and feature a stronger GPU – NVIDIA GTX 570 and therefore its unfair to mark the system down in this regard.

Ballista is uses top-class components and cable management has been carefully arranged by Utopia Computers; those who are keen to own a system based around AMD’s new FM2 would be well advised to take a look at this system.





Pros
+ Sleek looking case
+ Quality, branded components utilised
+ Great cable management
+ Great build quality

Cons
– CPU performance
– Graphics performance could be better


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