OcUK Gaming Mach 5R review

With prebuilt machines, or any machine really, you have to make some compromises. This could be going for a slightly more value-friendly GPU to fit your budget, or skipping out on that all-white build because you don't want to pay so much for colour-appropriate components.

The Ryzen 5 7600X3D chip in the OcUK Mach 5R excited me because it feels like a perfect compromise pick. You're still getting that sweet, sweet 3D V-Cache technology and the gaming performance boosts that come with it, but at a lower price point than usual, which allows you to throw a little more cash at the points that really matter to you.

Being a six-core CPU with 96 MB of L3 cache, it's sort of like a Ryzen 7 7800X3D (the CPU in my home rig) but with two fewer cores and a lower clock speed. When it launched late last year, it was initially a US-only Micro Center exclusive, with limited availability. In a rig like this, one with a beefy GPU but at a mid-range price point, getting 3D cache for the cheapest possible seems like a smart play.

I was initially worried that games like Borderlands 4, whose official system specs name an eight-core CPU as a minimum, would mean the rig would be bottlenecked. Turns out, from our own testing, that doesn't really matter. The number of cores matters much less than their quality.

The Ryzen 5 7600X3D is certainly a quality chip, matching a more expensive Ryzen 7 9800X3D rig of our own in many gaming tests. Naturally, you're taking weaker scores in the likes of Cinebench, but as a pure gaming machine, the combo of this CPU with the beefy Radeon RX 9070 XT is a winning one.

The AMD RX 9070 XT is a bit of a beast, delivering RTX 5070 Ti-level performance for a lower price, and with some substantial upgrades to ray tracing performance over its RDNA 3 predecessor. Stocks have been inconsistent since launch, both in price and quantity, but that doesn't change the fact that it's still super high performing, and can be overclocked nicely too.

I got lush Ultra level 1440p gameplay in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and managed to get an average frame rate into the high 70s. With a little frame generation boost, I reached just short of 190 fps on average in Cyberpunk 2077.

In the more CPU-intensive Baldur's Gate 3, a similarly specced 9800X3D rig will outperform it, but gaming performance is still great across the board in everything tested.

We tested another all Team Red build earlier this year, a Ryzen 7 7800X3D and RX 7900 XT build from US system integrator Origin, which clocks in at $3,000, or £2,200 at today's exchange rate. Comparing the two rigs, the Origin price premium is made clear. My results for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Cyberpunk 2077, and Black Myth: Wukong are all better in the Mach 5R, and the Neuron's Baldur's Gate 3 stats place a little higher.

For the same $3,000, you can also get the Corsair Vengeance A7500, though sadly that's not available in the UK, either. Still, it's a build which comes equipped with an RTX 5080 and Ryzen 7 9800X3D. In our tests, this little Corsair beauty naturally outpaces the Mach 5R in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, Baldur's Gate 3, and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition.

The Mach 5R does handle its own in Black Myth: Wukong and frame gen-enabled Cyberpunk 2077 tests, though Cyberpunk 2077 without frame generation fares better on the Corsair rig. Still, for around £400 less, it's hard not to be impressed with how much fight the Mach 5R has in it when it comes to games.

In the likes of 3DMark Time Spy Extreme, CPU scores sit far behind almost every gaming PC we've tested in recent months. In Cinebench 2024, this rig achieves a score only fractionally better than the Core i5 14400F Lenovo Legion Tower 5i, which houses a CPU that is older and less expensive than our Ryzen.

All of this contributes towards a rig that, while it can do some productivity tasks, really shouldn't be bought with productivity in mind. If you are a video producer or digital artist who also plays video games, this little six-core rig would not be my recommendation, and I'd pump some more of your budget into a more capable chip, even at the expense of that lovely GPU.

One thing that did peeve me somewhat about the RX 9070 XT when it first arrived was that it sags off the motherboard. It just has a slight curve downwards. The PCIe slot in the Asus TUF Gaming B650 Plus Wifi motherboard doesn't appear to be made from a flimsy material and comes with a reinforced housing, so I wouldn't be worried about bending the pins in the GPU.

But it annoyed me nonetheless and was quickly sorted with a support bracket to secure it in the rig, more for my own peace of mind than anything else. This is something we experienced building our own rig with the Asus Prime RX 9070 XT, so it's not an Overclockers issue, but a bracket or support in the box would have been a welcome touch.

Though all parts survived just fine in transit, I did spend the first day or so entirely reinstalling Windows.

After installing my test games and getting the likes of 3DMark and Cinebench downloaded, I found Windows to just be a tad funky. Now, admittedly, some of that was down to user error—I won't bore you with the details—but I found that sometimes Task Manager wouldn't work, and regularly closed itself down. Then, one catastrophic restart caused the PC to fail to find my original profile and went into an entirely different local account. This account was not mine, and it's seemingly something that happens with Windows updates on occasion.

I couldn't get back into my account until the computer resolved itself an hour or so later. Even then, Task Manager wasn't fixed. I wiped the entire PC, reinstalled Windows, and everything has worked fine from there. Given that no hardware problems popped their head up in my time testing the rig, this is more of a footnote of my annoyance, but the Mach 5R still made a strange first impression.

I did, however, spot that the BIOS on the motherboard was also three versions behind, being Version 3222 from March 5, this year. As a chronic 'I'll update the BIOS when I have issues' guy, I do understand how this happens, though I would have appreciated it if it were fully updated prior to shipping.

One thing I did appreciate about the software in the Mach 5R is how unbloated it is. Not even AMD's software is preinstalled, and the largest annoyance in setup is skipping through all the ways that Microsoft encourages you to pay for its services (which again, I had to say no to twice due to the false start).

The motherboard of choice here, the Asus TUF Gaming B650 Plus, offers a healthy smattering of ports, plus two PCIe 4.0 slots and one PCIe 5.0. The Aerocool Integrator Gold 750W PSU also gives a little overhead for overclocking.

You won't be able to get the most power-hungry GPUs in it with the current power setup, should you want to upgrade in the future. It will handle a stronger CPU or any of the smaller upgrades, like more memory or better storage, without a problem, though. The cable management in my review rig is also clean.

It is strung together with zip ties, which can make adjusting those wires a little awkward for future upgrades, but they are trimmed and well placed.

The case that houses all this computing power is a Phanteks XT Pro Ultra. It's definitely more on the value side, and, alongside the CPU and PSU, is one of many small compromises made for a solid price point, but it's a strong and capable case nonetheless. Despite all the RGB in the three front-facing fans, plus one fan on the back and the fan on top of the cooler, the sleek black covers just enough light to not feel too gamery.

The case supports MSI Project Zero, Asus BTF, and Gigabyte Project Stealth motherboards, so there's some room here for future upgrades, too. The front and back fans are all 140 mm, and given that larger fans can push through more air on lower RPMs, my review unit constantly feels both cool and quiet, even under heavy load.

Running through high CPU loads, I got this rig to hit 81 degrees Celsius, and the max I could get the GPU up to in standard gaming is a mere 55 degrees Celsius.

Though my first impressions with this rig weren't the most positive, it's hard not to be impressed by how well-specced and priced the OcUK Gaming Mach 5R really is. Going forward, the six-core CPU in the Mach 5R may hold back some very CPU-intensive games a tad, but it's got strong per-core performance, and the value proposition is made clear. And you're only really giving up a couple of frames in specific games for the $100 or so you're saving.

We're also big fans of the WD Black SN7100—our current pick as best SSD for gaming today—that sits in the Mach 5R (though this rig has 2 TB of storage and we tested the 1 TB version), and the 32 GB of Teamgroup T-Force Delta UD5-6000 RAM is a solid choice in a rig at this price point.

Given the CPU costs around £300 (£280 right now), the GPU is currently selling for £615, the motherboard comes in at around £150-200, and factoring in the cost for memory, storage, cooling, and the PSU, the raw price of these components isn't massively far off the £1800 figure that the prebuilt will cost you, and it's even a bit cheaper than that as of the time of writing.

The 3-year warranty is pretty decent, too. It's true that building your own gaming PC is the best way to maximise value in a rig (and you could maybe slice a few hundred off building this at home with some different compromises), but one thing I can say about the Mach 5R is that I'd be rather happy if this tower showed up at my door.

AMD has come out of the gate strong with its CPUs and GPUs lately, and that Team Red build has never looked quite so attractive, especially when it's in a well-tuned rig like this one.