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 three
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?
♪ (LTT theme) ♪
Cooler Masters 25th anniversary edition Cosmos 2
Features a unique dual curved temperd 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 millimetre cooling radiator hides
Like the Bolt 3, the Bolt X is available in both the brushed aluminium 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 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 cables
and all hardline water cooling setup with red dyed liquid to match the
exterior our unit has both the CPU [says 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 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(hundred)K and 32 gigs of DDR4 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 a [lien Lee] 750 watt
80 + Platinum modular power supply. So then it should come as no surprise that
even without the 5 gigahertz factory overclock option our Bolt X 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, 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 fifteen hundred 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. Ting is a mobile carrier that cares
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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.ting.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