Review: Playtech Hunter

This review is part of our September 2012 Gaming PC Shootout. Find full specifications, benchmarks and comparable models here.


PC retailer on Auckland’s North Shore and has been building custom computers for many years now. The gaming PC we have here is a customised version of its Hunter desktop PC, specifically geared towards 3D gaming.

The Hunter comes in the Arctic White version of the popular Corsair Vengeance C70 mid-tower case, with matching white-sleeved GPU and motherboard power cables by BitFenix.

Cable management is superb both in the visible portion of the case and the invisible rear side behind the back panel – this can be an unsightly bird’s nest of wires if the builder doesn’t put the time and effort into tidying it up, so brownie points to Playtech for that.

At the heart of the Hunter is an Intel Core i7-3770K overclocked to a formidable 4.5GHz. It sits underneath a capable Corsair H80 watercooling system. Pushing the pixels out is a factory-overclocked Gigabyte GTX 670, which powered the rig through even the most demanding games and benchmarks in our test set.

The O/S drive is a 60GB Intel 520 series SATA3 SSD, with Windows 7 Home Premium installed. This is a good, fast drive, however you would be surprised how quickly 60GB can fill up these days (especially when certain games start pumping out 2GB patches every other month – cough, Battlefield 3, cough) so thankfully they have included a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for added storage.

Rounding out the specs is 4GB of dual-channel G.Skill RipjawsX memory, Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, Asus DVD writer, and FSP 750 power supply. Never heard of FSP? Well if you have ever used an OCZ, Zalman, Antec or Silverstone power supply, it’s possible that it was an OEM product built by FSP. This time they’ve just opted to put their own sticker on the box.



Also worth noting is that the PCB of the video card and motherboard, as well as the heatsinks on the memory sticks, are all blue. This provides an aesthetically pleasing trim to the Artic White case – cute.

Moving on to performance, the Hunter lives up to its namesake. The overclocked CPU and video card propel its results past the otherwise identically-specced Acer Aspire G5 Predator which we also tested in this roundup, most notably in the Cinebench scene rendering benchmark – a good sign if you are into 3D animation.

Despite having all graphics settings in our tests at their highest levels the Hunter comfortably sits above the all-important 60 frames per second average figure, even at 2560 x 1440. All except for Battlefield 3 that is, which started to chug a bit at that higher resolution.

All up it’s hard to fault the Hunter. A bigger SSD would have been nice, but you can always configure this when ordering through Playtech’s website – depending on how much you want to spend. The build quality, cable management and component choice all serve to reinforce Playtech’s status as one of the best PC builders in New Zealand.


This review is part of our September 2012 Gaming PC Shootout. Find full specifications, benchmarks and comparable models here.