Gadgetory

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 one 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 listed 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 a 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 sleeves power K 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 bull Tex 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 ran 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 v2 7 TI gaming is equipped with an intel core i7 7700 k and 32 gigs of DDR for 3,000 ram and as for the GPU well that's my friends is what a water-cooled GeForce GTX 1080 Ti looks like and the whole thing is running off alien Lee 750 watt 80 + Platinum modular power supply fill then it should come as no surprise that even without the 5 gigahertz factory overclock option our bull fax killed our 1080p gaming test suite but what might be surprising is just how well it killed it we gathered all of these jobs at stock speeds for both the CPU and GPU meaning that the performance difference over our testbench here was purely driven by the efficiency of digital storms hydraluxe water cooling loop no part of our system ever dropped from max turbo which was totally why I should have named my son max turbo anyway sorry even synthetic tests including a combined load of fur mark and i-264 didn't manage to make it throttle which is great result 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 bush 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 nuts not happening the 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 bull text to the public for another couple of months and while the preliminary pricing that they've given us says it will be starting at fifteen hundred US dollars they are starting configuration for the bolt three at that price suggest 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 what the bull techs 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 bull tax has got you covered ting is a mobile carrier that cares about your satisfaction it truly is an unusual thing isn't it so when you call them you don't speak to a robot you get put through directly to a person and it doesn't cost extra in fact you pay only for what you use with the average ting bill coming in at just 23 bucks a month and if you're stuck in a contract they will also cover 25% of your cancellation fee up to $75 so check them out today and take advantage of their lower mobile data rates beyond the first gig is just $10 per gig and every single tank customer their porting it backwards will be able to reap the benefits of this new change so head over to Linus dot king.com to try out their savings calculator and see if you'll save by using ting and when you sign up at our link you'll even get twenty-five bucks in service credit or towards a new device so thanks for watching guys if you just like this video you can hit that dislike button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is a link to our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which you should totally join