A Pentium Anniversary Edition CPU is installed, overclocked to 4.5GHz and installed in a Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 ATX motherboard. Being an ATX board, it offers much more upgrade options than the smaller micro ATX boards used in other budget gaming PCs. You you get not one but two PCI Express x16 slots (one of which is limited to x4 speeds), plus an additional pair of PCI Express x1 slots and two PCI slots. This makes the Magmadon GTX 750 TI the most upgradable PC we’ve seen for some time. See what’s the best gaming PC?
Dino PC Magmadon GTX 750 Ti review: graphics card
Unfortunately, although 2-Way AMD CrossFire is supported, there’s no support for Nvidia SLI, so you won’t be able to boost the gaming performance by simply plugging in an extra graphics card.Despite using the more advanced Intel Z97 Express chipset, the Gigabyte GA-Z97-HD3 is a rather cut-down motherboard, omitting features such as support for M.2 SSDs and providing fewer external USB 3.0 ports than you might expect. However it does offer official overclocking support from Intel. Also installed is 8GB of DDR3 memory with two memory slots left available for upgrades. We were a little surprised to find a stock Intel processor cooler installed, but the system managed to pass our torture tests without crashing. We recorded a maximum core temperature of 95 degrees, which is a little higher than we would like, but still lower than both the Scan and YOYOTech PCs which reached 100 and 99 degrees respectively. Cooling is assisted by a large front-mounted case fan which is illuminated with a cool blue LED.
Dino PC Magmadon GTX 750 Ti review: monitor
An Iiyama E2483hS-B1 monitor is included with a proper 24in screen – none of your 23.6in nonsense here – and fast TN panel technology ideal for action gaming and a Cooler Master Devastator keyboard and mouse combo is provided with illuminated keys and a high resolution mouse. Unfortunately, these quality components eat up a large portion of the available budget leaving us with only enough for an Nvidia GeForce GTX 750 TI graphics card. It’s an overclocked model from Palit, but it still can’t match the frame rates of a GeForce GTX 760 that you might expect on a gaming PC of this price. You’ll have to decide whether the added features and security of the Z97 Express based motherboard with its official support for overclocking are worth sacrificing a noticeable number of frames per second.
