OcUK Titan Pandora Gaming System Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing 

Coming in at £1300 delivered for the model we reviewed, the Titan Pandora comes in at a competitive pricing point.  Sitting at around £140 more expensive than the Chillblast Barbarian we reviewed just a few weeks ago, we can see where the extra has been spent in comparison. The Pandora boasts a higher end case, better cooling solution (240mm rad in push versus the Barbarians 120mm rad in push pull) and double the capacity when it comes to high speed SSD storage. The warranty can be extended from 3 to 5 years for a mere £59.99, which is well worth it in our opinion.

The Titan Pandora can be customised and purchased from OCUK here.

Overview

Benchmark wise we can see the Titan Pandora and Chillblast Barbarian are neck and neck in almost all tests due to their hardware specification being almost identical. Worth noting is although the Titan Pandora trails slightly in all of the CPU related test, this due to its overclock being 4.2Ghz whereas with the Barbarian it is 4.3GHz. If you / Overclockers were to tweak this to say 4.4GHz or more the benchmarks would sit it higher up the chart scores and beat its closest ranked competitor. We tested our test system at 4.6GHz and it ran for over an hour benchmarking without issue, something we hope OcUK will take advantage of in the future. With its slightly faster core speed and marginally better shader performance the Galax GeForce GTX 970 actually uses 5w less power than the Windforce card that the Chillblast system sports, the Galax 970 had the edge in GPU related tests, though only just. Our sample came with Windows 8.1 64 bit on and I’m pleased to report that aside from all of the latest drivers there was not a single piece of additional software in sight.

Acoustically speaking the Titan Pandora is fairly quiet. The three 120mm fans never seemed to go anywhere near to full speed even after a while of benching, with the CPU fans occasionally spinning up slightly for a few minutes then back down again. The dual fan Galax GTX 970 is quiet at idle, though under benchmarking, began to spin up to be moderately loud under prolonged strain. Still, even at this point it was not uncomfortably loud, and was still quieter than a stock GTX 970. When it comes to thermals we found Galax GTX performed well indeed, shaving 12 Celcius from the reference cooler at 69 degrees after 45 minutes of being under load.

I found that the system as a whole was very refined, with premium touches such as the LCD model of the case and high spec RAM. The lack of optical drive didn’t bother me, though I could imagine a potential customer taking this for granted then having to get a USB drive afterwards may be irksome, though personally I’ve had no use for one for years. The case means the enthusiast can literally pull it to pieces should they want to access, add or upgrade any component in seconds which is always a nice thing to have in the back of your mind when purchasing.

Pros

• Excellent cable management
• Great component selection
• Great chassis choice for home gaming PC
• Great overclocking potential

Cons

• No optical drive
• Case can be awkward when moving, not a good choice for LAN parties

“The Overclockers Titan Pandora is a fierce contender for those seeking both style and substance in it’s price bracket, and well worth considering.”

Thanks to Overclockers UK for providing this review sample.