Overclockers Kinetic H1M

VERDICT Some aspects are lacking, but its hard to get this much gaming performance for so little cash.

- James Archer

THIS IS THE second £600 gaming system we’ve seen from Overclockers in a few months, following the Kinetic Z3 (Shopper 365). That was a decent budget PC but failed to excel in any particular way, especially when you can get the Mesh Ryzen Gaming PC – CS (Shopper 364) instead. This costs £49 more but has a massively more powerful Ryzen 5 2600 CPU and a 120GB SSD to complement its hard drive; typically, £600 will only yield entry-level chips and mechanical storage.

The Kinetic H1M comes with an Intel Core i3-8100, 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk; if anything, a downgrade on the Kinetic Z3, which has the same CPU and RAM but a 2TB drive. However, the Kinetic H1M has a trump card, passing over the budget GTX 1050 Ti graphics card in favour of a 3GB GTX 1060.

That’s pretty exciting, as the only other GTX 1060 system we’ve seen hit £600 is the PC Specialist Obsidian Elite (Shopper 364), which compromised on a weak Athlon X4 950 processor. The Core i3-8100 is no mid-range Ryzen, but it’s much better than the Athlon at allowing the GPU to run unthrottled, which makes this a far more able gaming machine.