It is clear to see that this machine is a monster and can chew through everything without any hassle at 1080P resolutions. However, as we are unable to test at any higher than that with our current test bench, it is difficult to say how it will perform at a resolution of say 1440P or perhaps with a dual (or more) monitor setup. In our eyes, and taking the cost of this system into consideration, we feel that a 4GB card (or two in our case) would have been more suited towards those wanting ultimate performance and for those wanting their investment to last that much longer. Of course, the other alternative is an AMD HD 7970 which has 3GB of VRAM, thus putting it in the middle of the two, and it actually performs better than the NVIDIA GTX 680s with current drivers. However, the GTX 680 is still a very powerful card and should see your games running at a very high level of detail for a while yet. The KFA2 EX OC cards which are used in this system come overclocked from 1006MHz to 1111MHz on the core, straight out of the box. This will give you extra performance over a standard card.

At the centre of Ultima 9550i Tyrannosaur MKIII is Intel's Core i7-3770K. OcUK have overclocked this CPU to a punchy 4.6GHz. This boosts the overall performance of the system significantly. Ensuring additional bandwidth is given in areas that other components cannot.

In terms of the storage options that come with Ultima 9550i Tyrannosaur MKIII, there is just a single 1TB drive for the bulk of storage which we think could be improved upon for the given cost of the system. 1TB doesn't last very long with all things considered - games, movies, music and other data can quickly fill up a drive of this capacity. A 2TB hard drive as secondary storage would have been a better choice. Something worth noting is that a variety of systems below this value from other rivals come with a 2TB (or bigger) drive installed. The 120GB SATA-3 SSD which is made by Samsung is a great choice and should provide you with high-end performance and reliability.



The DDR3 in this system runs at 11-11-11-28 which compared to the more commonly used CL9 kits is going to be slightly inferior. The performance difference is within a margin of error but for those forking out over two thousand pounds, it could really be improved upon. The chances are that you will not actually see any difference in your games if you were to use higher frequency memory or a kit with tighter timings. However, the increase in frequency and tighter timings have their advantages. Memory which runs at higher frequencies or has tighter timings can have its benefits in other areas of computing such as encoding which can demand greater bandwidth, thus improving productivity.

The motherboard used in this system is a Gigabyte Z77X-UP4 TH which is a motherboard with plenty of onboard features such as m-SATA for an SSD cache drive. Its main selling point is the two ThunderBolt connections though. ThunderBolt is one of the connections that are still very few in number but they are going to become more mainstream within the next couple of years. They allow you to connect up to 6 devices on each port, such as external hard drives and other peripherals. You can also use them to power a monitor if you wish to do so. They have 10Gbps connectivity speeds which is blisteringly quick. It also has a three year warranty period and as it is a Gigabyte board, it should outlast that as they have a proven reliability record.

From our experience with Ultima 9550i Tyrannosaur MKIII we can confidently say that it deserves our Silver award. Ultima 9550i Tyrannosaur MKIII is very powerful and indeed, very capable. It will handle the most demanding tasks without any issues and thanks to a significant boost, the overclocked Core i7-3770K provides a key advantage over it just sitting at stock settings. We have been impressed with this system, it looks great, is reliable and is a good investment.

** UPDATE ** OcUK has taken into account that some areas could be tweaked, memory speed for this system has been adjusted to 16GB 1866MHz, HDD storage drive is now 2TB and PSU is now TX 850 Modular. In our view, this is significant and we commend OcUK for making these changes.