Vibox Element X Green Gaming PC Review

John Williamson / 9 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

At the time of writing, Vibox has set a recommend a retail price for the Element X Green at £649.92. This includes a 2-year warranty which covers any component damage. Even more staggering, the company offers a magnificent lifetime warranty on labour and technical support. This is extremely unusual and adds a great deal of value to the overall package. As with all system reviews, we believe it’s vital to perform a component rundown and compare the costs of building an almost identical system yourself:

Case: Vibox Predator Green Gaming Case = £49.99
Motherboard: MSI 990FXA-GD65 Motherboard = £82.99
Processor: AMD FX-6300 6-Core CPU Overclocked to 4.4GHz = £92.40
Processor Cooler: Thermaltake Water 3.0 = £50.15
System Memory: 8GB Patriot DDR3 1600MHz = £36.99
Main Boot Drive: 120GB Patriot Blast SSD = £37.50
Additional Storage Drive(s): 1TB Toshiba DT01ACA100 1TB SATA 6GB/s 7200RPM HDD = £38.13
Graphics card: MSI Radeon R9 380 GAMING 2GB GDDR5 = £151.66
Power Supply: Aerocool Integrator 600W 80+ Bronze = £28.76
Optical Drive: 24x DVD-RW = £9.38
OS: Windows 10 64-bit = £76.48
Extras: LED Strips = £6.99

Once totaled up this equates to £661.42 and costs £11.50 less than a self-build while offering lifetime after-sales support.

Overview

The Vibox Element X Green is a fantastic starter PC for consumers on a tight budget. Despite its very accessible price point, the system is capable of high frames rates even when all the advanced graphical details are cranked up to maximum. Clearly, it’s designed for the mainstream 1920×1080 resolution but also manages to achieve respectable numbers at 1440P. Furthermore, if you reduce the texture quality or AA slightly, there’s no reason why 60 frames-per-second cannot be maintained. However, modern engines are beginning to utilize huge amounts of VRAM, and the GPU’s 2GB limit is incredibly small by today’s standards. As a result, I strongly recommend Vibox opts for the 4GB model instead to alleviate these concerns.

In terms of build quality, the chassis is pretty durable and adopts striking design. It’s certainly not for everybody though, and the bright green illumination can take some getting used to. Although, if you prefer a more subtle approach, simply unplug the LED strips. Personally, I think the case is good for the money, but it might feel flimsy to those who are familiar with higher-end solutions. Honestly, you cannot realistically expect a £39.99 case to be built from the finest materials and the overall construction is decent enough.

On another note, Vibox’s engineers have done a splendid job in the overall build and crafted a balanced system. For example, the memory doesn’t contain any lavish heat-spreaders which usually increases the price and has almost zero effect on performance. Everything has been carefully thought out to reduce costs and provide the best cost to performance ratio possible. The cable management is quite good given the chassis’ lack of rubber grommets and non-modular power supply. While it’s not perfect and the collection of molex adapters can look a bit garish, but the general picture is very impressive.

Under heavy stress, the CPU remained relatively cool and features a significant frequency increase to 4.4GHz. As expected, the single-threaded benchmarks showcased how far AMD are behind in synthetic tasks, but this doesn’t heavily impact on the gaming experience. The impeccable cooling hardware allows for minimal noise under load, but the idle output is disappointing. Thankfully, the fan speeds can be adjusted to operate in near-silence during basic tasks.

The system’s boot drive reported superb read and write speeds and wasn’t too far off more expensive models. For a basic gaming build, ultra-fast SSDs are pointless due to the cost involved, and the majority of data is stored on a larger mechanical disk anyway. The perfect combination is a low capacity, budget SSD and 1-2TB data disk.

In conclusion, the Vibox Element X Green is the perfect example of how affordable PC gaming can really be. The specification and gaming performance at 1920×1080 is magnificent devours the current crop of consoles by a considerable margin.

Pros

Excellent load temperatures considering the 4.4 GHz overclock
Fantastic networking
Good cable management
Lifetime after-sales support
Perfect configuration for 1920×1080 gaming
Remarkably quiet during intensive games
Stunning price to performance ratio
Superb SSD read/write speeds on a budget
Wonderful setup guide with clear diagrams

Cons

2GB video memory could become a bottleneck in the future
High idle power consumption

Neutral

Bright green case lighting might not be to everyone’s tastes but this is a subjective complaint
Slightly loud during idle conditions but this is easily fixed in the BIOS

“The Vibox Element X Green offers an astonishing price to performance ratio and is the perfect choice for high frame-rate 1080P gaming.“