ViBox Wildfire MK3 System Review
Overview
We’ve started to see more and more Gaming systems here at pcG, which of course is always nice to see. But what constitutes a Gaming PC? Many people just use it as a label for selling Gaming to all and sundry any which way they can… But here at pcG we know a thing or two about Gaming PCs, so when Vibox asked us whether we’d like to take a look at a couple of their latest Gaming systems, we obviously jumped at the chance.
The first Gaming PC from Vibox that we will take a look at is the Wildfire MK3. This particular model is housed in a Mid-Tower Case Black/Red
case equipped with a SuperFlower Golden Green HX 650w Gold Power Supply. Inside there’s an MSI Z97 Gaming 3 motherboard fitted with a Intel Core i5-4690K CPU (running at an overclocked 4.4GHz, although ours seemed to be at 4.6GHz!) that’s cooled by way of a Corsair Hydro H75 Liquid CPU Cooler. The system features 16GB of HyperX Beast memory running at 2400MHz. Graphics horsepower is provided by way of a single MSI GEFORCE GTX 960, while storage is catered for with a 240GB HyperX Fury SSD and a single 1TB Seagate HDD. According to the website the Wildfire MK3 should also come with a Optical Drive, although I didn’t receive one!? The Wildfire MK3 system also comes with Windows 8.1 64Bit pre-installed.
The ViBox WildFire MK3 arrived at pcG extremely well packaged in a massive cardboard box sealed with ‘Fragile’ tape.
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On opening the outer box I was shocked! The System within was packaged with the strangest packaging material that I’ve ever seen! It appears to be made up of shredded boxes, odd as it looked it worked extremely well.
With some of the strange packaging removed I then discovered another box, this was the box of the NZXT H440 that the system was now (hopefully!) housed within. Also in the top of the box there was a Vibox Help leaflet, which was nice to see. This leaflet provides some basic installation details, Windows/Driver installation information as well as some troubleshooting tips, should you need them…
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Once the inner box was out of the outer box, we could begin to see what we might be getting as the front of the NZXT H440 box shows off the smart looking H440 case within. On opening this box we find (no more crazy packaging!) but that the system itself is well protected in a plastic bag and supported by hard foam blocks. In addition to this the MSI Z97 GAMING 3 motherboard box is stuffed with all of the other paperwork and accessories that came with the other components of the system.
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On searching in the box for other components we come across the main power cable also. Within the MSI motherboard box there’s a lot of paperwork as you can see from the image above right.
At the time of writing the Vibox Wildfire MK3 is retailing at approximately £997 from Vibox and comes with a 2 year limited warranty.
Specifications/Features
courtesy of Vibox
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* Additional details available here
First Impressions
First impressions of the Vibox Wildfire MK3 are very good, as the NZXT H440 looks stunning with its matte black powered coated finish with the red accents. The case seems like a good choice then? Well when pcG Mike took a look at the H440 recently he discovered that the front of the case offered very little airflow, so maybe the case isn’t such a good choice after all; we shall see…
Looking in through that left side window everything also looks good with that NZXT logo on the PSU shroud and with the red colour scheme running through the rest of the build. My only concern is that the smart looking MSI Graphics Card is only a basic an Nvidia GTX 960, at a thousand pound I was expecting (and dare I say wanting) a little more. Although this does suggest that the aforementioned lack of airflow is unlikely to be cause for concern…
Looking towards the top of the case and its control and IO we find: a power button with circular illumination, that also double as the Storage LED indicator, reset button, headphone & microphones ports, x2 USB 3.0 and x2 USB 2.0 ports.
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With the left side windowed panel removed we get to better look at the components within and the quality of the installation, and very tidy and neat it is too!
At the bottom we have the large red NZXT Power supply shroud that helps to make this install to look as good as it does. The central NZXT logo is made from perspex and looks like it’s going to illuminate, fingers crossed… 😉
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Looking at the back we can see the large 140mm fan of the dual fan Corsair H75 liquid CPU Cooler. Note the fact that the NZXT H440 cleverly mounts the Fan/radiator assembly on sliding mounts for ease of installation and clearance compatibility. The back of the case is pretty much a standard affair, with the only view of the SuperFlower Golden Green HX 650w Gold PSU you’re going to see at the bottom.
Removing the front panel of the NZXT H440 allows us to see the three 120mm intake fans in front of the case and the associated fan filter. Note the sound deadening material used on the inside of the front panel. But also note the small amount of area allocated on the right of the front panel for the fans to suck their cool air in from!
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On the top of the Power Supply shroud there are two 2.5″/SSD mounting brackets. The sleds, held within can be removed by a single thumb screw, and the drive itself is secured to the sled by way of four screws. In the one of the right we find a single 240GB Kingston SSDNOW 300V SSD; plenty of capacity for your average Windows install. The specifications for this drive are not great for a modern SSD at 450MB/s Read and 450MB/s Write, but in testing I got 555MB/s Read and 531MB/s Write, now that’s impressive…
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At the back of the case we find the rather large (thanks to its two 120mm fans) Corsair H75 liquid CPU Cooler. An impressive high performance cooler to help cool the overclocked Intel Core i5-4690K CPU. Vibox’s website states that this should be 4.4GHz which is impressive in itself, but our test system was overclocked to an even more impressive 4.6GHz with a voltage of almost 1.3v.
Hiding away on the motherboard we have some beastly RAM sticks too! Vibox have opted to fit the Wildfire with a pair of 8GB HyperX Beast modules running at 2400MHz giving a total of 16GB of RAM.
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Now we come to the most importation part of any Gaming system, the Graphics Card. Vibox have opted for an MSI GTX 960, it’s not a bad card by any means but in my opinion (in a system costing a thousand pounds) it’s not really good enough and is likely to let the overall system down.
The illuminating MSI dragon logo and brand name almost makes up for this, but not quite… 😉
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Looking around the system at the general quality of the build it all seems very good indeed, you can see that someone has taken a good degree of time to get the install right. The coloured cables within the main 24-pion power cable though let things down a little. A PSU with all black cabling or better sheathing would look a lot better IMHO!
The cabling found at the bottom right of the motherboard was particularly tidy and well hidden. This is thanks to the design of the NZXT case as much as it down to the quality of the install.
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At the top of the case tucked under the lip there’s an illumination strip of LEDs, now this is not part of the NZXT H440 case and is something the Vibox have added. It’s certainly welcome and looks good when on. But I did notice on this cabling and other cabling in the system, that Vibox are not cutting the ends of the tie wraps very well with numerous of them left with very sharp edges, which is a bit of a shame. Especially as there’s an inexpensive tool that you can get to do this job properly, leaving all ends flush with the clip! 😉
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Removing the right side panel of any pre-built system will always give you an indicator as to the amount of time the system builder put into his/her job. Well as you can see someone’s gone to a fair bit of trouble with cabling well routed and loomed. Ok so the PSU cables (at the bottom) are a little untidy but to be honest I don’t think that’s likely to bother anyone, especially as that’s why the PSU shroud is there. We also (in the image above centre) get a look at the HDD for the first time, it’s a Seagate 1TB model, but unfortunately it’s not an SSHD/Hybrid drive which would have been nice. Also in the centre of the case chassis we see the pre-installed fan hub that’s actually part of the NZXT H440’s design.
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Overall it would seem that Vibox have put together a good Gaming system here, it certainly looks good and it’s undeniably well built. My only concern really is in the component choice as (at this price point) the Graphics Card, an MSI GTX 960 is s a little lacking in the Gaming horsepower department, and that’s got me a little worried…
Testing Methodology/Setup
After some initial testing with Windows 8 it was time to push the Vibox Wildfire MK3 through our suite of Gaming benchmarks. All of these benchmarks were run at stock settings (i.e. the PC was in the same state that it was sent to us in, no modifications were performed).
Hardware Performance
- Vibox Wildfire MK3 Gaming PC Results – (stock settings)
| Benchmark | Result |
| Batman: Arkham Origins | 140.0 FPS |
| Tomb Raider | 65.5 FPS |
| Metro Last Light | 59.33 FPS |
| UNiGiNE Heaven | 907 |
| 3DMark (Fire Strike) | 7018 |
NOTE: The Vibox Wildfire MK3 is an overclocked system out of the box. The CPU has been overclocked from a stock frequency of 3.5 GHz to a massive 4.6GHz, although this is not guaranteed as the Vibox website states a 4.4GHz overclock!? The Graphics Card (MSI GTX 970 GAMING) is also overclocked as Vibox have set up a MSI Afterburner Profile to do this. The end result is that the Graphics Core Boost clock has been increased from 1316 -> 1466MHz, while the memory clock has been increased from 3508 -> 3802MHz.
From a performance view the benchmarks show that the Vibox Wildfire is good for standard 1080P Gaming. But pushing beyond this would require more Graphics horsepower such as a Nvidia GTX 970 or a Radeon R9 290X. The performance of the CPU and associated subsystem is extremely good, thanks to that 4.6GHz overclocked Intel Core i5-4690K and the Overcloked 2400MHz HyperX Beast RAM.
General Gaming while playing Games such as the demanding Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was also found to be good, with the Wildfire MK 3 producing healthy frame rates of around 50FPS while using the High settings preset (and turning Nvidia Hairworks Off!).
On Vibox’s website we find a list of Game and framerates for those games and this system. When I first looked and saw this I thought it to be a risky move and it would seem that the FPS were also rather high! So I decided to do some testing of my own. The good news out of the three Games that I tested all came within a stones throw of Vibox’s quoted figures… 😉
| Game | Vibox quoted FPS | pcG measured FPS |
| Far Cry 4 | 75 FPS | 70 FPS |
| Crysis 3 | 58 FPS | 60 FPS |
| Sniper Elite 3 | 98 FPS | 102 FPS |
During testing the Vibox Wildfire MK3 never put a foot wrong, there was no sign of instability and we saw no crashes at all. This suggests that its impressive 4.6GHz overclock with a voltage of 1.3v has been dialled in well. And that CPU was kept cool too by the high performing Corsair H75 AIO water cooler. The PC was also setup with very little bloatware (actually none!) gracing its 240GB SSD, which is always nice to see. The PC was also super quiet in operation despite the case having five 120mm fans in it! Noise was kept to a minimum with the maximum noise produced being around 35dBA.
One software issue I did come across was that Vibox had not changed the default install of the Killer Network App that automatically turns on ‘Enable Bandwidth Control’ and sets your max bandwidth to 10 MBs, for me and my internet connection this is too slow and had the effect of cutting my network speed in half! At default settings my Steam download speed was 10.6 MBs with Enable Bandwidth Control off it was a far healthier 19.6! 😉
Final Thoughts
Vibox’s Wildfire MK3 is a well put together, good looking Gaming PC with some top notch components. But money needs to be saved somewhere and in this system the money seems to have been saved (rather oddly!) on the most important component, the Graphics Card!?
The Wildfire MK3 came to pcG well packaged and extremely well protected in a massive cardboard box, with what must be the strangest packaging material I have ever seen! At least this made the un-boxing more interesting than usual! Within the massive outer box we found an inner box containing the system itself. Also included loose in the box we found a power lead and a useful ‘Help! I need somebody’ guide. Maybe it is here they could explain how to set the speed of your internet connection via the installed Killer Software App – so it doesn’t nerf your connection speed! 😉
Once out of the box the system’s beauty could be beheld; the Wildfire MK3 is one seriously good looking Gaming PC, and that’s before we even power it up! The good looks come mainly courtesy of the good looking NZXT H440 case and a very clean, tidy professional installation. Someone has taken a fair bit of time on the installation of all of the components, it was a shame then to find sharp cable tie ends dotted around the inside of the case. Once power on we find the Vibox have also installed some custom while lighting, which looks good and compliments the illuminating NZXT logo on the PSU shroud nicely. In general there’s little to fault about the look and install of the Wildfire MK3, so let’s talk about what Vibox have chosen to put inside, as I think component choice is a little, well odd…
First I must say that the MK3 version of the Wildfire is the cheapest of three, with the two more expensive versions having GTX 970 and GTX 980’s in them. I say this as my real beef with this particular system is the cost and the use of a GTX 960. Why? Well because at £1000,00 I would expect more from a Gaming PC; this particular example has many top notch components but the Graphics Card is NOT one of them. It’s a PC that strikes me to be ‘Form over Function’ as it looks so good. But to be fair I have to confess for 1080P Gaming the WildFire MK3 is a reasonable performer, but you’re not going to be able to use those Very High/Ultra settings in Game, despite (what is today) quite a low resolution for PC Gaming…
Personally I would have saved money on the CPU Cooler, even under clocked it a little closer to 4.2GHz perhaps, used 8GB of RAM (even 1600MHz) and used a cheaper case. That way we could have had a GTX 970 installed and ended up with a good deal more horsepower!
And while the 240GB Kingston SSDNow V300 SSD performed extremely well with a measured Read sped of 555MB/s and a Write speed of 531MB/s, it would have been nice to have seen a 1TB SSHD/Hybrid drive here instead of a very slow old fashioned 1TB HDD. Especially as this is where most of your Steam/Origin/Uplay/GoG Games are going to live.
From a pure performance point of view though the Vibox Wildfire performs well enough (with the right settings!) at 1080P, but if you want a better experience the you’re either going to need to spend more money on say the MK2, or opt for a cheaper build (with the same Graphics Card) like the Defcon 1 – Red!
Verdict
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Vibox Wildfire MK3 
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Many thanks to Vibox for providing this sample for review
