20 of the Worst PC Setups March 2017 and more

I’m sure at some point you’ve had a bad PC setup. Maybe moving into a new place, waiting for a new desk to arrive or you just ran out of room. I can remember my horrible PC setups from when I was living at the dorms in college. If you have ever ventured over to the Shitty Battlestations sub-reddit you will find a lot of horrible PC setups. We will are going to pick 20 each month and feature them as 20 of the Worst PC setups for that month. Here are some of the bad ones from March.

I've been testing the new Ryzen 5 1600X extensively over the last week or so, and have come to really love what AMD has achieved with it - offering 6C/12T of CPU performance for $249. But now the 6C/12T processor has been overclocked to 5.9GHz on LN2 by overclocker der8auer....

Low cost and automatic fan control set Arctic’s Freezer i32 apart from most of its competitors, but is it the best value for Intel’s current processors? Everyone has a perspective on value, yet manufacturers and marketing teams don’t always seem to get the word on pricing from the street. Arctic launched its $50 MSRP slim tower cooler to compete against models quoted up to around $75. Because street pricing has put some of those competitors between $50-60, we’re happy to see the Freezer i32 available for as little as $30.

You've probably noticed the current shift towards RGB-everything in the PC market, with ASUS heavily towing the line; some love it, some loathe it, but it's here to stay and is being adopted rapidly. ASUS seem keen to update their product line to incorporate their "ASUS Aura" branding across the board.

The 5N2 is the successor of the 5N, which we've already reviewed last year. On the inside there is now an upgraded quad core SoC running at 1.6GHz (1.2GHz with the 5N) making sure there is enough processing power and apart from that there are two 1 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces (1 interface in the 5N) for quick transfers. Drobo is keen on making their NAS as easy to use as possible. One key feature is the possibility to add disk drives of different sizes to an array.

A good chair is the ideal piece of equipment for every hardcore gamer or users who spends lots of hours in front of their PC. The noblechairs EPIC series looks quite interesting for the money it asks, offering good quality and great comfort.

The QNAP TVS-473 is a state-of-the-art network attached storage system that combines powerful hardware with incredible software.

The Ryzen 5 1600 is an exceptional value. Even compared to more affordable CPUs such as the Core i5-7600K, the new six-core Ryzen chips are a much better buy, regardless of what it is you plan to do with them. Thus let's discuss R5 1600X vs 1600.

“Quantum” is one of those technology words that seems to generally be associated with good things in computing – like “fuzzy logic” used to be with washing machines. But where the Samsung CF791 is concerned, quantum means something. This is the first screen we have seen with “quantum dot” technology, which is an improvement on regular LCD technology that promises better colour.

About two years ago, we looked at the latest creation from the minds of MSI. The GT80 Titan was their boldest move yet, and set the bar for performance, featured the world’s first fully mechanical keyboard on a gaming laptop, and packed in one of the largest displays available, with the 18.4-inch FHD panel. This was the only Broadwell quad-core laptop we tested, since the mobile quad-cores were very short lived, and were quickly replaced by Skylake. It featured two NVIDIA GTX 980M graphics cards in SLI, and sat atop our Notebook Bench with the highest performance we’d seen, at least until NVIDIA’s Pascal came along.