PCSpecialist Helio Elite review: a brilliant budget build

Ryzen 9000 Series processors are finally here, with prebuilds featuring the CPUs naturally following suit. In the wake of Zen 5, PCSpecialist aims to please gamers in search of a PC on a budget with Helio Elite.

Helio Elite costs £1,249, making it cheaper than the similarly specced Zircon Elite R we reviewed a few years ago. This naturally comes with some cutbacks to achieve the lower price, but all bar one ultimately leads to a system with smarter hardware for its target audience.

Specifications

At the heart of Helio Elite is a Ryzen 5 9600X and GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB. This processor and graphics card combo is ideal for those aiming to primarily play at 1080p, providing a balance of CPU and GPU grunt. The latter’s VRAM also affords room to game at 1440p, unlike its 8GB counterpart.

All these components rest on an Asus Prime B650-Plus motherboard. While this chipset isn’t as feature-rich as X670, this board packs more punch than you might expect. For one, it supports PCIe 5.0 x4 storage, a rare quality among its ilk. It certainly doesn’t lack in connectivity either, with eight rear USBs (six of which are USB 3.2 Gen 1 or faster).

Despite the motherboard’s lack of native Wi-Fi support, PCSpecialist has welcomingly included an add-in card to plug the gap. While I’d sooner use the system’s 2.5Gb Ethernet, both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.0 are undeniably convenient to have.

A 1TB Samsung 990 Evo NVMe SSD and 750W Corsair PSU round off the sensible choices made by PCSpecialist in configuring Helio Elite. The latter boasts 80 Plus Gold certification, no less, giving the system an efficient base from which to operate.

Truly, there’s little to fault Helio Elite on. If I had to identify any room for improvement, though, it’d be in the choice of RAM. Sure, 16GB of DDR5-5200 is enough for today’s games but 32GB would improve the system’s longevity without much impact on cost. Slightly higher speeds wouldn’t go amiss either, particularly given how sensitive Ryzen performance can be with memory.

This party of parts comes together neat and tidy inside a rebadged Lian Li Lancool 205 Mesh C. The case features a mesh front panel and tempered glass side, both of which give you a lovely look at the innards of the system, with smartly managed cables to boot courtesy of the builders at PCSpecialist.

I’m a big fan of the hidden 3.5/2.5in drive bays, tucked away behind an unassuming panel alongside the power supply. However, a dust filter would be top of my wishlist in lieu of one here.

Performance

CPU

With a maximum boost clock of 5.4GHz, it should come as no surprise that Ryzen 5 9600X performs well in Cinebench 2024’s single thread benchmark. It even clips past results for Core i7-14700K in a competing prebuild, despite its competitor’s higher clock speeds. These chops serve it well in gaming, as we’ll observe later.

As a hexacore processor, Ryzen 5 9600X was never going to top the multi-threaded scoreboard. However, the CPU’s results as part of Helio Elite are a reminder that its 88W PPT, unfortunately, holds it back. Even the admirable cooling chops of PCS FrostFlow 100 V3 can’t save it from its priority of efficiency over performance.

To be clear, a score of 887 is respectable, but we’d expect it to notably increase following impending BIOS updates that will increase its TDP to 105W.

RAM

AMD claims DDR5-6400 is the sweet spot for Ryzen 9000 processors, providing a 1:1 ratio between memory clocks and infinity fabric interconnect. Helio Elite is short with its Corsair DDR5-5200 kit, but that’s still plenty of speed for most tasks.

Strangely, however, both latency and bandwidth are slightly below where we’d expect them to be for this capacity and speed of RAM.

Storage

The 1TB Samsung 990 Evo SSD turns in sequential read performance in line with its specifications. While its sequential writes are a few hundred megabytes below advertised speeds, this isn’t something that you should notice much at all in real-world applications. Whichever way you cut it, the drive is more than fast enough to handle the demands of games and general productivity.

Apps

Helio Elite is a gaming PC, first and foremost, but it’s no slouch when it comes to general use either. Whether you hope to double up using the system for school, work, or pleasure, it’ll see you right.

Gaming

It’s no shock that GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB can’t keep pace with more powerful graphics cards, try as it might. What it does offer, however, is rock-solid performance across our test suite at 1080p and 1440p.

The system’s surprisingly deft handling of ray tracing at 1080p is impressive, delivering 81fps on average in Far Cry 6. It’s just under par with Cyberpunk 2077 at 58fps, but turning on DLSS Frame Generation sees performance soar to a whopping 111fps.

Triple-digit frame rates in Rainbow Six Extraction show this system has plenty to offer competitive gamers, too. This is using the game’s Ultra Quality preset, so expect even higher performance if you normally turn graphics settings down.

Vitals

Given the relatively modest specifications, power consumption is naturally low. Sitting idle, it sips just 64W from the wall and only calls for 278W under load. This makes it one of the most economical PCs we’ve seen, beaten only by Zircon Elite R by a handful of watts.

Neither processor nor graphics card is left wanting for cooling in Helio Elite. While we have seen lower temperatures for Ryzen 5 9600X using much more powerful (and expensive) water coolers, PCS FrostFlow 100 V3 nets an admirable result.

PCSpecialist manages its system noise with grace, both idle and under load. There’s no noisy pump to contend with here, so this is all on the manufacturer’s choice of fans and their tuning. Topping at out 46.1db, it’s certainly audible in a quiet room but not obnoxiously so, and you’d be hard-pressed to hear it with a headset on.

Should you want to, there’s certainly room for a more extreme curve to push temperatures down even further. However, there really is little call for this, given how well it performs out of the box.

Conclusion

As a tech journalist used to the finer hardware in life, it’s easy to forget how brilliant budget builds can be. Helio Elite leaves me pleasantly surprised by its capabilities and value.

The performance of the system should improve over time, too, with AMD increasing the TDP of Ryzen 5 9600X to 105W. This will, of course, come at the expense of power draw, but this should be an optional uplift when it does arrive. Nonetheless, as part of Helio Elite in its current state, it’s a solid and efficient performer that’s more than equipped for this PC’s primary purpose: gaming.

Building PCs can be difficult for those new to the hobby, and I have no qualms warmly recommending Helio Elite as a way in. Likewise, if you’re looking for a reliable, relatively affordable prebuild devoid of fuss, you can’t do much better.

PCSpecialist Helio Elite

Verdict: A high-performing, quiet, and efficient gaming PC that’s perfect for 1080p.

Pros

Great for FHD/QHD gaming
Cool system temps
Quiet under load
Lean power draw
High value
Three-year warranty

Cons

Middling MT results
RAM could be faster
No dust filter

Buy