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The Maingear X-Cube Z170 (starts at $899; $2,930 as tested) is a high-end gaming desktop that eschews the traditional PC tower build for a square design. Excellent hardware helps it deliver speedy performance in all areas, but it’s with graphics and gaming that it really shines, matching or beating almost all of the competition for more than $2,000 less than our former top pick, the latest Falcon Northwest Tiki . As such, it replaces the Tiki as our Editors’ Choice for small-form-factor (SFF) high-end gaming desktops.
Design and Features
Despite being billed as a SFF desktop, the Maingear X-Cube Z170 has a relatively large footprint, putting it somewhere between a console-size PC like the Tiki, and a high-end gaming tower. It measures 13.3 by 16.3 by 18.3 inches (HWD), quite a bit bulkier than the also-boxy Velocity Micro Raptor Z40 (13 by 7.9 by 12.5 inches), which means you’ll still have to make some room for it on the floor or a desk.
The system’s Corsair Carbide Series Air 240 case, which is available in black or white brushed aluminum, can be situated either vertically or horizontally, and rubber feet on the bottom can be moved for either orientation. All of the components in the enclosure are neatly and tightly put together, with no cords or drives hanging loose, and a windowed side panel makes them all easily viewable.
The front panel has two USB 3.0 ports, a headphone jack, and the Power and Reset buttons, along with mesh grille for air circulation. Ports and plugs on the back panel include two USB 3.0, two USB 2.0, one USB Type-C, three audio jacks, two PS/2 ports, and Ethernet. Video outputs include three DisplayPort, one HDMI, one DVI, and one VGA. The Falcon Northwest Tiki (2015) has several more USB ports, but the selection on the X-Cube Z170 should satisfy most hard-core gamers. There’s no Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connectivity on board—you have to rely on Ethernet, which is fine as most games benefit from its faster connection speeds.
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You don’t need any tools to access the X-Cube Z170’s interior; you can remove the thumbscrews with your fingers. Right behind the glass on the left side is a set of LED lights that shine into the enclosure. Maingear packages a remote control for these, and you can configure the lights’ behavior (such as strobe and fade) and color. Storage comes by way of a hyper-fast 400GB PCIe-based solid-state drive (SSD) as the boot drive and a 4TB 7,200rpm hard drive for data; that’s a generous amount, though the Tiki supplements the same-size boot drive with a 6TB hard drive. There’s also a single Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti discrete graphics card. There is a free slot for one PCI Express x1 slot, so your expansion options for another graphics card is limited, since you’d have to remove the speedy PCIe SSD that the system comes with.
The Intel Core i7-6700K processor on the Asus Z170M-Plus motherboard is cooled with Maingear’s Epic 120 closed-loop liquid cooling system, which requires a radiator at the back of the case. (Three additional 120mm fans, two at the top and one at the rear, also help ensure good airflow.) Also preinstalled is 16GB of dedicated DDR4 RAM, with two open slots for adding more. As with many smaller desktops, such as the Digital Storm Eclipse , there’s not a lot of room for additional expansion—just one slot that can fit a 2.5- or 3.5-inch SSD or hard drive.
Maingear knows that gamers don’t like their systems cluttered with a bunch of preinstalled programs, so aside from Windows 10, there are none to be found on the X-Cube Z170, much like the Maingear Drift . Maingear covers the X-Cube Z170 with a one-year warranty.
Performance
With an incredibly fast SSD and its CPU overclocked to 4.5GHz from 4GHz, the X-Cube Z170 is an outstanding performer. It scored near the top on our PCMark 8 Work Conventional test, with a commanding 4,211. Among gaming desktops, that score has only been surpassed by the Maingear Epic Torq (4,241); other top-tier systems, including the Falcon Northwest Tiki (2015) (3,593), the Origin Chronos (X99) ($1,224.00 at ORIGIN PC)(Opens in a new window) (4,111), and the Maingear Drift (3,668) just couldn’t keep up.
See How We Test Desktops
The X-Cube Z170 proved itself a bit more average with multimedia tasks, however. It finished the Handbrake video encoding test in 52 seconds—that’s not a bad time, and it’s faster than we saw from last year’s Maingear Drift (1:53), but the Falcon Northwest Tiki (0:33) and Origin Chronos (X99) (0:32) were both noticeably faster. The X-Cube Z170 finished the Photoshop CS6 test in 2 minutes 20 seconds, just edging out the Epic Torq (2:36), though not by much, and behind the Drift (1:43).
Its graphics performance helped further distinguish the X-Cube Z170. Its 33,737 result on the 3DMark Cloud Gate test was beat only by the Falcon Northwest Tiki (44,953), and no other system has scored better on Fire Strike Extreme (8,641). The X-Cube’s score is similar to that of the Epic Torq (33,911 on Cloud Gate, 8,214 on Fire Strike Extreme); expect both desktops to be able to play graphics-intense games at very high frame rates.
On our gaming tests, the X-Cube Z170 attained 118 frames per second (fps) on Heaven and 130fps on Valley, with the highest detail settings. In both cases, those results were better than those of the Tiki (105fps on Heaven, 112fps on Valley) and the Drift (80fps on Heaven, 90fps on Valley), demonstrating the system’s great gaming prowess. It beat the current Editors’ Choice on both tests with medium settings, too, reaching 280fps to the Tiki’s 230fps on Heaven, and 182fps to the Tiki’s 146fps on Valley. The X-Cube is just a winner when it comes to graphics performance.
Conclusion
The Maingear X-Cube Z170 offers plenty of processing power with its Intel Core i7 processor and sports a unique, boxy design. And though it’s packed with plenty of great components and cooling, it doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for expansion slots—what you see is what you get. But because its graphics capabilities are among the best we’ve seen in a SFF gaming desktop, and because it runs $2,400 less than the Falcon Northwest Tiki, it’s a relative steal, and our new Editors’ Choice for the category.
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Source link : https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/maingear-x-cube-z170
