Systems

Stormforce Onyx Ryzen 1200 Review

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December 6, 2017 9 Min Read
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Exactly how far does £599 go when purchasing a pre-built gaming system with a 3 year warranty? Read on to find out.


Product on Review: Stormforce Onyx Ryzen 1200
Manufacturer: Stormforce
Street Price: £599

A complete PC tower for under £600 is a big ask, especially when it’s aimed towards gaming. We’ve seen the trends of VR and 4K floating around, but if you’re not too interested in the bleeding edge of the gaming industry but are instead happy to settle for medium/high image quality settings and a 1080p resolution, perhaps the Onyx Ryzen 1200 will be the machine for you.

Featuring an AMD RX 560 graphics card, with 2GB of VRAM onboard, an AMD Quad Core Ryzen 1200 CPU, 8GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1TB HDD, the spec’ sheet isn’t as lacking as you might’ve thought at this price range.

We intend to find out just how capable such a machine is for an entry into the PC Master Race.



Stormforce on the Onyx Ryzen 1200
The “Stormforce Onyx Ryzen 3 RX 560” is based on the very latest cutting edge AMD Ryzen architecture. Equipped with an AMD Ryzen 1200 running at sublime 3.40GHz, this powerful quad core delivers performance by the bucket load. A huge 8GB of DDR4 RAM runs at a swift 2133MHZ, delivering blindingly quick multitasking performance.

Technical Specifications

Processor
AMD Ryzen 3 1200
3.1GHz, turbo to 3.4GHz
2MB cache

Memory
8GB 2133Mhz DDR4 dual channel RAM
Supports up to 32GB
2 DIMM sockets (2 used)

Hard Drive
1TB Western Digital HDD

Optical Drive
No optical
Software
Windows 10 Home
30 day trial of Microsoft Office included

Motherboard
ASUS Prime A320M-K

Display
N/A

Graphics
Radeon RX 560 2GB graphics card
1x DisplayPort
1x HDMI
1x DVI-D

Audio
High definition 8 channel audio

Input Devices
Keyboard and mouse not supplied

Networking
Wired internet connection only

Power Supply
500w PSU

Dimensions
Height: 456mm
Width: 208mm
Depth: 381mm

Motherboard Interfaces
1 x PS/2 keyboard (purple)
1 x PS/2 mouse (green)
1 x D-Sub
1 x HDMI
1 x LAN (RJ45) port(s)
4 x USB 3.1
2 x USB 2.0
3 x Audio jack(s)

Expansion
1x PCIe 3.0 x16 (used)
2x PCIe 2.0 x1
2x 3.5 internal bays (1 used)
1x 2.5 internal bays

LEDS
Red LED fans

Case
StormForce Onyx mATX Gaming Case
1x USB 2.0 (front)
1x USB 3.0 (front)
2x audio jacks

Warranty / Miscellaneous
3 Year Collect, Repair and Return Warranty

Packaging & Bundle

We’ll keep the packaging description short – the box is sturdy and the machine is held inside the box incredibly well.



In terms of a bundle included you will receive the motherboard manual and a power lead. Things are kept minimal, but costs have to be kept down to reach that £599 price point.

Closer Look

The Stormforce Onyx Ryzen 1200 arrives in a medium-sized Cooler Master MasterBox Lite 3.1 chassis, fitted with a shiny acrylic panel on the open side, along with a glossy plastic front.



The front of the case draws air from the top and bottom through some small vents, our tests will indicate whether or not the 120mm fans, residing behind this plastic shroud, are able to pull enough air through.



The rear panel is home to a reasonable assortment of connections for a budget PC. There’s a PS2 mouse and keyboard port, a VGA and HDMI for the onboard graphics, 4x USB 3.1 Type-A ports, 2x USB 2.0 Type-A ports, an RJ45 and a stereo audio output, a line-in and microphone-in.

On the AMD RX560 we see an HDMI, DVI and DisplayPort 1.4.



The PSU is mounted at the bottom and draws its air from the underside through a mesh filter.



The front IO panel is home to a single USB 3.0, USB 2.0, audio input and output and a power switch.

Closer Look (Internals)

The removal of the side panel couldn’t be easier. There’s a thumb screw on each corner which you unscrew, allowing you direct access to the internals.

Once the side is removed, you can really appreciate the effort that Stormforce has gone to in terms of cable management. For a budget machine, we’re genuinely impressed by the routing and use of space behind the motherboard tray.



There’s 8GB of DDR4 memory installed (2x 4GB Sticks). The RAM doesn’t feature any kind of heatspreader, but due to the low voltage of DDR4 and the “standard” speed of 2133MHz, it’s unlikely the kit will produce much heat anyway. Unfortunately, the motherboard only features two DIMM slots, making upgrading the system memory more costly than it otherwise could have been.

Stormforce has also used the AMD Wraith Spire CPU cooler which blows air down onto the chip through a heatsink, while also distributing a measurable airflow to the surrounding VRMs and power delivery chips, helping to improve stability and increase long-term system life.

The AMD Ryzen 1200 CPU chip features 4 discrete cores but lacks the SMT of the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips. The stock clock speed sits at 3.1GHz, with a turbo clock of up-to 3.4GHz when thermals allow.

Installed below the CPU is the Sapphire RX560, featuring 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM clocked at 7000MHz and 1024 stream processors running at a clockspeed of 1350MHz.



The front of the case employs two 120mm fans as an intake, drawing cool air into the system, while the rear 120mm draws the warm air out of the back and away from the system.

The 1TB Western Digital HDD is placed at the bottom of the machine, away from any other sources of heat. There’s space for another 3.5” drive underneath and a 2.5” drive above, allowing room for an SSD to be added at a later date.

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.


This test highlights the lack of any Solid State storage, relying on a spinning disk for the operating system increases boot times considerably; however, you do receive 1TB of storage at a much lower price point than even a 256GB SATA SSD.

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: PCMark 8 & 10, 3DMark & Heaven 4.0

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.


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

The Stormforce Onyx Ryzen 1200 uses the AMD RX560 for graphics delivery, in this section we test the latest gaming titles to see how effective the 3D capabilities are. We report on the average framerate using FRAPS.


Conclusion

Considering the £599 price tag, we’re incredibly impressed by the overall performance of this machine. We checked the individual price of the components from some well-known retailers and found the total to be very close to the price of this machine; pretty astounding when you consider the time and effort spent on building the computer, along with installing the Windows 10 operating system. That’s without mentioning the 3-year “collect, repair and return” warranty on the whole machine.

We feel pretty safe assuming this kind of machine will more-than-likely be hooked up to a 1080p/60Hz monitor. The performance at this resolution was astounding from such a relatively cheap machine. We saw GTA V hitting framerates up into the 90s while maintaining a solid 60FPS within the benchmark once V-Sync was activated, thanks to the RX560.
The CPU also managed a respectable 481 in the Cinebench CPU test; we also saw little in the way of struggling within the PC Mark 8 & 10 tests, which tests the processor from many different angles.

During our tests, we set out to find how well the case could draw air in through the small vents at the front. The noise caused by the machine was a little more than desired, but if the PC was placed under a desk or a headset used, the fans wouldn’t be noticed all that much. Temperatures were kept under control despite running taxing benchmarks, we saw a maximum of 76°C on the GPU and 48°C on the Ryzen 1200 CPU.

One major downside with this gaming machine was loading times due to the spinning hard disk drive; however, we can fully understand the choice of using an HDD instead of an SSD, especially with current NAND pricing. Perhaps this is something the user could upgrade in the future, providing a decent speed boost to the system as a whole; the case possesses a single 2.5” drive mount which would allow the installation. The boot time felt like a month compared to today’s SSD-dominated PCs, however once booted and in a useable state, the system was very useable.



ZooStorm has managed to construct an entire gaming PC, capable of 1080p gaming and light media/office work for under £600. No mean feat.

Pros
+ Incredibly cheap, entry-level gaming PC
+ Great performance at 1080p
+ Capable Ryzen CPU
+ Good looking chassis
+ Excellent cable management
+ Scope for upgrades

Neutral
+- Can be noisy under heavy load

Cons
– Slow boot and load times


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