Building a PC has been a nightmare. Let’s not mince words, the supply chain apocalypse in addition to the crypto mining (re)boom, and possible (re)bust, has made building your own system prohibitively expensive... if you could track down all the components. Even before these issues, buying a prebuilt became more and more attractive as the prices System Integrators (SIs) charged started to compete with home builds.

These days, at least overseas, the cheapest and at times only way to obtain new generation GPUs was to buy a prebuilt and either use it or scavenge the parts required and sell the rest. That did not quite work in South Africa, but probably the most effective way to get a new system is to buy a prebuilt. Recognising that, ASUS have started working with various retailers in SA to offer these types of systems.

The Case – A Premium Build for a Premium System



The first thing on display is quite obviously the case. Long, long gone are the days of one size fits all, beige boxes. In fact, I doubt many reading this review ever saw one of those in person. Modern components require modern cases with plenty of room for radiators, water loops and proper airflow to cool the increasingly power hungry and thus heat-generating components. Well, the ROG Strix Helios is the case to meet any and all needs the novice PC builder or expert water cooler would ever need.

Billed as a mid-size case, it certainly looks and feels like a full-size tower. It completely dwarfs my mid-size Corsair 4000D and is much roomier internally. Externally the case is premium through and through. The brushed aluminium chassis is cool to the touch and the charcoal paint scheme stands out when lit up. The front and both sides are sheathed in tempered glass, a luxury that is not wholly appropriate or necessary, but showcases the “premium-ness” of the case. I say unnecessary as the right-hand panel showcases your… motherboard cut-out. Seriously, it shows nothing else, not even your OCD inspired cable management as that is hidden behind an appropriate metal shield. Although this is something you can remove should your cable management be near godlike.

The glass panel is set at least an inch away from the fan grill, sporting space for three preinstalled 140mm fans.

The front panel is etched with some nice lines and the ROG branding and when the case is turned on, the RGB side lighting is nicely reflected in these etchings. I left the lighting on unicorn puke, and it played beautifully across the etching, dancing in a nearly hypnotic fashion. For those worried about airflow through the front of the case, don’t be. The glass panel is set at least an inch away from the fan grill, sporting space for three preinstalled 140mm fans, allowing air to flow around it via the top and bottom and into the case. It will not be as efficient as a full mesh front but running an i7-12700k and temperatures came nowhere near thermal limits.



The left-hand side is the functional tempered glass window into the beauty of your system. It is a full-sized panel giving you a good view of the internals and once your RGB is set up, will be beautifully lit.

Both side panels feature a tool-less clip release making for easy installation and removal. A simple press will have the panel slipping out, but not falling over as it will be held by the case. I would still advise that you keep one hand on the panel when releasing and use two hands to remove as it is quite heavy.

Internally the case is extremely roomy. The quite large AMD Radeon 6800 looked reasonably sized in this case and if you were to use it for a fully water-cooled system you will have ample room for hardline tubes, a reservoir and radiator support. Radiator support is comically extensive. By that I mean if you can imagine it, you can fit it in. The front has space for anything from a 120mm to a 420mm radiator with a maximum thickness of 90mm while at the top you can fit in anything up to a 360mm radiator with a max thickness of 60mm, the rear up to 140mm and while the bottom doesn’t officially have radiator support, I am certain a brave and ingenious case modder can figure out a bottom mount. Though why you would need to do that, I cannot fathom.

The front has space for anything from a 120mm to a 420mm radiator with a maximum thickness of 90mm.

All in all, the case sans any components weighs in at a hefty 18kgs. Add in your components and with water-cooling support, I can easily seeing you double that weight. Luckily the case has a sturdy adjustable Velcro carrying strap on the top. The strap is thick and sturdy and feels like it is made of nylon so highly unlikely to snap. While the case is advertised as easily transportable, given the size, weight and risk to the glass panels, I would suggest that if you are looking for a case for frequent LAN parties you look at a mini-ITX build instead.

The ROG Strix Helios is an exceptional case and with the room available, it's an easy case to maintain your system as well as use well into the future as you upgrade components. Using it for this pre-built was an excellent decision by ASUS, both from an aesthetic point of view as well as one meant to extend the useful life of a very expensive part of any system.

Specced to be Ahead of the Curve, Slightly Over Budget, but Useful for Many Years


The pre-built system sent to me is not your top tier system, but it isn’t budget either. The guts of the system are well within reach of anyone with a healthy bank balance. This is not a system that will send you to the poor house, but you do need to budget appropriately and instant noodles may be on the cards for a bit. Having said that though, it is a system that you shouldn’t need to touch for at least five years to play games on the highest settings and probably would last longer than that with tweaks to game settings.

The system provided to me for this month-long test included the following:

- i7-12700k
- Radeon 6800
- 16GB of DDR 5 XPG Lancer RAM
- ROG Strix Z690 Motherboard
- 1TB Kingston PCIE Gen 4 m.2 SSD
- ROG Thor 850P PSU
- ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO

The components are the latest, and arguably the greatest from all the manufacturers. Starting with the CPU, the i7 may not be the top-of-the-line Alderlake CPU, but from a price to performance point of view it is the best. Supporting DDR 5 and future proofed to support PCI-E Gen 5. As a K SKU chip coupled with a Z690 board meaning that you can attempt some serious overclocks should you so wish. Of course without proper cooling, any overclock is doomed to failure and luckily the system includes a top of the line Ryujin II AIO. This 360mm cooler offers premium cooling for a premium CPU ensuring that even in our normally high temperature climate your CPU will stay far from thermal limits under load.

The Ryujin II includes a mini-TV. Sorry LCD display that can be programmed to show anything from videos to gifs to system stats. I set it to its useful setting – showing system temps and other stats. But if the fancy takes you your imagination is the only limit on what can be displayed. When I received the system, I though that the cooler had broken in transit as the screen was hanging off the water block. Luckily the screen attaches to the block with magnets and is meant to be removed.

The 5200MHz clock speed of this kit couples with the CPU to give nearly unheard-of performance.

This screen, though, pointed me to a housekeeping issue with modern builds. As a convenience, modern systems provide power to the USB ports when the system is powered down allowing you to charge devices even when the system is off. However since your keyboard, mouse and other peripherals are connected via USB and are generally RGB these days, that means that they are powered on and vampiring power too. The only way to stop this is to go into the BIOS and change the settings to stop the system from providing power to the USB ports. You could use Armory Crate to switch off the RGB and the Ryujin screen or rather do what I did and just switch off the PSU at the switch.

Coupled with this is a DDR5 kit from XPG, fully taking advantage of the power of the i7s performance cores. If you know anything about DDR5 RAM you know that it is as rare as hen’s teeth now, but ASUS have been able to source units for their systems. The 5200MHz clock speed of this kit couples with the CPU to give nearly unheard-of performance... well, unheard of if you haven’t been watching any review and build videos recently. Even so, the performance upgrade from my Ryzen 9 + DDR 4 build was something quite astonishing.

If you know anything about DDR5 RAM you know that it is as rare as hen’s teeth now, but ASUS have been able to source units for their systems.

The CPU and RAM, while impressive, would be held back in gaming and video rendering tasks if not coupled with the right GPU. Well, this system features AMDs Radeon 6800, a mid to high tier card, and my first non-Nvidia card since my ATi Voodoo 2 from over twenty years ago. With the rDNA2 cards, AMD is giving Nvidia some serious food for thought and me as well. The performance amazed me and given that this is AMD’s first-gen ray tracing card, it absolutely floored me.

Finally, power delivery is key and the Thor 850P is 80Plus Platinum rated so is the most efficient, based on the rating, PSU that you can buy. The PSU includes a little LCD display to show you the wattage a useful indicator of the amount of electricity your gaming sessions are using.

Superior Performance

The system is a powerhouse. That’s all that needs to be said really. The tests I ran, and the results thereof are just emphasizing this point. This is a 1440p beast and well if 3DMark is to be believed an exceptionally capable 4K system too.



In Time Spy the system scored just under 16 000, really a meaningless number. What matters is that in terms of gaming performance, it is estimated that this rig can run Battlefield V at 1440p with settings at Ultra and still achieve over 150FPS. That is without raytracing enabled, but according to Port Royal this system is capable of over 140FPS at the same settings. So yeah, it’s pretty capable and as I stated earlier this GPU from AMD really surprised me and has me considering switching to Team Red. Full disclosure, I do not have a 4K capable monitor and I wasn’t lugging this beast into my lounge to test it on my TV, but it should be able to hit that magic 60FPS with ease in gaming with settings at Ultra.



Synthetic benchmarks are all well and good but what about gaming benchmarks? Well, both Shadow of the Tomb Raider and The Division 2, the former with ray tracing enabled, showed that as a gaming beast this machine is just that. The former returned a result of 99FPS and the latter 113FPS. A slight comedown from the 3DMark results, but impressive nonetheless when you look at the settings details.




In actual gameplay, and I threw in Control for good measure due to the excellent implementation of ray tracing. The card blew me away. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the card managed to average 136FPS, The Division 2 is averaged 117FPS and in Control, 99FPS. These were at 1080p so slightly downgraded from the 1440p results of the benchmark, but still exceptional. Each game was set to Ultra settings on all settings and both Control and Shadow of the Tomb Raider had ray tracing settings were set to the highest possible settings.





This system is going to leave you gobsmacked with performance like this for the next few years.

A Prebuilt Worth Your Savings

This ASUS prebuilt demonstrates what is possible when a manufacturer partners with an SI to bring customers the best possible system to suit their budget. It isn’t the cheapest possible build, but if you are able to take a longer term view, this is a system that will serve you well for years to come and with minor upgrades in the first five to seven years could possibly be cost effective over its lifetime.