OverClockers UK Review

About a month ago, my current gaming set-up just stopped doing it for me. My laptop, as loyal and trusty as it was, had begun to really show its age. It became clear when even smaller scale games were starting to take real performance hits on some of the newer titles. The fan was making a horrible noise and it was clear that my favoured gaming machine was just not going to bear the load of my gaming needs for much longer.

So I decided that between my new job that offers me much better financial stability and my hobby of writing blog posts for gaming, I needed a proper gaming machine that could offer me the ability to continue to experience the latest and greatest gaming content. It was finally time for me to buy a real, true gaming PC. 

My experience with really powerful gaming PCs is sparse. About the most I knew was that I needed a real graphics card, not just Intel HD Graphics, to be able to play anything of any real merit. This was from my previous experience in buying laptops and was a lesson that was expensive for me to learn, as I had gone through multiple different machines to find out that PC gaming is not as simple as buying a machine that looks good.

So, I set out on researching what I needed to know. But the world of PC gaming is a rabbit hole; once you start to scratch the surface it’s information overload. There are so many layers to this segment of gaming that it felt like a mountain of information. Suddenly my vocabulary expanded to include bottlenecking, overclocking, multi-threading, motherboards, and much more. It seemed impossible that I would ever conquer this mass of information because what information out there was contradictory and over-loaded.

Go into any PC build forum and you can see that the gulf of knowledge between the serious gamers and the newbies is huge. There are many builds posted that are picked apart because of the tiniest detail such as whether to go for an Intel 7500 or a 7600k, a difference that at first glance appears to be just numbers and letters, but apparently means something significant (it’s to do with the generation of the processor, ‘k’ apparently stands for the latest ‘Kabylake’ processors that have come out).

This was where I hit the point of intimidation; I didn’t have the time or patience to really get into the nitty gritty of building a PC; a process where I buy each modular part for my machine individually and put them together myself. I was worried about the problem of liability; where if I built this machine and some tiny thing went wrong in the compatibility, or if I made a tiny miscalculation, there could be a costly disaster on the scale of the hundreds of pounds, a price that as a value-conscious consumer I was not willing to risk.

So I decided, I was going to pay for someone to custom-build my PC. It would be an easier option, as an expert would be taking on any liability if the build went wrong, and most of the sites I looked at had options to examine the compatibility of each part. This was where Overclockers UK came in.

I will qualify this by saying that I am not sponsored in any way and currently make nothing in terms of advertising revenue, so quite simply, this is just a blog post detailing my experience out of a passion project and nothing more.

Overclockers UK is at first an intimidating site. There are a number of options available and it is confusing to navigate. They offer a huge range of PC gaming parts so the sheer amount of what is available makes it difficult to actually feel like you’re navigating to the ‘right’ custom-build PC option. That said, this tempted me toward the special offers part of the page, which led me to my current build.

I had done plenty of research up until this point, so I knew ball-park figures of parts and performances I was expecting. This was where the interface of OCUK took over and guided me through the parts. Thankfully, the buying process itself is relatively painless; each part you can buy has a nifty red/green button stating its compatibility and how much more/less it will cost if you customise to that part. This made it very easy to tailor the experience to what I want.

In the end, I settled on a gaming PC that suited me well; NVIDIA 1070 graphics with an i7 Intel processor. While I could have gone with a better value option at the i5, which also came over-clocked, I felt that for the price I was paying I could afford to pay a little extra to have the luxury of a bigger number next to my processor. Payment was taken easily and a variety of options makes it easy to come to an arrangement that suits you.

Delivery was the most difficult part of the order. The PC itself would take 7 days to build and another couple of days to deliver. As I live in a remote part of the UK, I thought that I would have to closely monitor the build and shipping times. This was because I was aware that other people that took significant deliveries in my area (not with OCUK) had problems due to issues with the postcode. That being said, the support I was offered was exemplary and I was given satisfactory information about what was happening with my build at any point I requested.

The final delivery was made promptly, actually a day earlier than expected and exactly to the instructions that I had given. Excitedly, I took my PC and connected it up, with the advice and support of my more hands-on fiancée (okay, she actually did the work). Everything worked well, but I soon found that my PC was not performing as I was expecting on certain games.

The next day, I called up the customer support line, and this was the only problem that I had with OCUK as a customer. Unfortunately, I found that the man on the other end on the phone just did not seem friendly or happy to help me. But the advice he gave me was spot-on. It wound up that I had, in my excitement, forgotten to install the appropriate drivers for my graphics card! This quickly fixed any issues I had with the PC, as the drivers allowed me to customize my experiences to the level I needed.

Overall, I would say that OCUK is a good company to order your PC with. While nothing they did totally exceeded expectations, everything was done promptly and professionally, and at no point was there a totally ‘bad’ situation that occurred. I was very satisfied with the order, and especially liked the touch of free Haribo sweets with the order, and on top of that, the geeky part of me found the shipment packaging so interesting in the way they use expanding foam to secure the parts. It’s extremely cool to look at!

So, to anybody out there that is like me and is interested in trying to get their new custom-build PC, and considering Overclockers UK as a company, I would say that they are totally legitimate and do everything they say they’ll do, and offer a good service. While I wouldn’t say they totally blew my mind, they didn’t need to; they just did everything right, and that is the most important thing of all.