Xidax X-5 Incisive Review

You may literally get a lifetime of service from this box

If there s one lesson we ve learned in life, it s this: Don t create false dichotomies. You know, such as: There are only two kinds of Maximum PC readers: those who like to see, buy, and read about $12,000 PCs, and those who only want to hear about the budget rigs that you can actually afford.

Since we ve already created that false dichotomy, we ll just roll with it. For the guys and gals who want to see something that s budget and different, Xidax has your number and is texting you as we speak. And we can honestly say Xidax s X-5 Incisive is truly different for us. To understand what Xidax was trying to pull off with the Incisive, you have to get that it s not just any budget build here. It s one intended for a budget gamer. That means there s no fancy six-core Haswell-E Core i7-5820K, DDR4, or four-way GPUs here. In fact, it may surprise you but there isn t even a quad-core inside. Instead, Xidax outfits this machine with a dual-core 3.7GHz Core i3-4360 part. Yes, an air-cooled dual-core. Xidax said it toyed with the idea of an overclocked Pentium Anniversary Edition but it saw bottlenecks in some games from the lack of Hyper-Threading on that chip.

On the other side of the PC equation, Xidax hopes to nullify your concerns over CPU performance with the new hotness: Nvidia s GeForce GTX 970 card. This budget card is currently making the rounds as the card to have, thanks to its price-to-performance ratio. The rest of the machine is well-apportioned—for a budget box, that is. There s a 256GB ADATA SSD, 500-watt Corsair PSU, Asrock Z97M Anniversary board, and 8GB of DDR3/1600. The case is a BitFenix Pandora Window. This is the first time we ve laid eyes on the micro-ATX Pandora, but we like what we see. It s a fairly narrow case but has a few nifty features such as a brushed-aluminum sidedoor that pops off without having to unscrew it (and top, too), and a handy front LCD screen. The screen is a 2.4-inch TFT that shows the BitFenix logo—or any image you decide to drop into it.

Since performance matters, we can t review this rig without comparing it to our standard zero-point—a six-core Sandy Bridge-E box with a dual-GPU GeForce GTX 690. There are two ways to look at how the Incisive did. You can glance down at the chart and see that a dual-core—even Intel s newest Haswell core—isn t going to put a dent into a six-core chip in our benchmarks. In some ways it s not as bad as you d expect, considering it s two cores against six—but then, it didn t win anything, either. The GeForce GTX 970 does OK, though. It s really only about 20 percent slower than the GeForce GTX 690. In the real world, this machine should be able to comfortably play every modern game at 1080p at or near 60fps, which was Xidax s aim with the machine.

Xidax has one more thing to entice you with this budget rig: a real lifetime warranty. The company says it will cover every component for life. That means if the GPU (well, except for AMD GPUs, which are only covered for two years due to Bitcoin mining abuse) nukes itself in 10 years, you ll get a replacement. Some will scoff that a lifetime warranty means for the life of the company, but Xidax isn t a newbie business.

It s backed by PC Laptops, a company that s been in business for 21 years. We looked around and it s true, we couldn t find any other vendor that offered such an aggressive warranty. Even high-end boutique PC vendors aren t as generous with a warranty, so such a promise is truly different.

The warranty doesn t give the box a free ride with us, though. While we get what Xidax was trying to do, we gotta say, corners could have been cut to get other components into this rig. We would have liked a motherboard that would at least offer the option for SLI support, even if it means swapping out the PSU down the road. And while a dual-core will work for most, it s probably only $75 away from a K SKU quadcore and $35 away from a locked quad-core chip. As much as we know Xidax wanted to keep the box to a usable $1,200, a dual-core in this world just feels odd.

The price itself is actually good at $1,200, though. We priced similar builds from higher-volume system builders and the difference was nil. And yes, we priced it out at retail, too, to the same effect. And none of those offered lifetime warranties, either.

$1,200, www.xidax.com

Our current desktop test bed consists of a hexa-core 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K 3.8GHz, 8GB of Corsair DDR3/1600, on an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard. We're running a GeForce GTX 690, an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.