A few weeks ago, a PC building company named Quoted Tech contacted me and asked me if I’d like to review a machine from them. This offer intrigued me for two reasons–the computer had an RTX 5070 graphics card, which I was keen to review, and the company was Canadian.
Quoted Tech assembles computers out of off-the-shelf parts for people who still want a custom machine, but don’t want to build it themselves. Companies like this have been around for a while, but until Quoted started a few years ago, there was little like it in Canada.
These are some of the gaming options. The company also has a ‘Professional’ series.
The company offers a variety of machines, and you can choose almost all of the specs yourself, and the company will build it to your preference. I was sent a Shield Extreme, which included a Ryzen 7 9700X, 32GB of RAM and 2TB of storage. Not to mention the RTX 5070 I mentioned earlier. It’s also got lots of cooling, and since this machine is part of the company’s gaming line of computers, it also has a decent amount of RGB lighting. As someone who isn’t a big fan of the gaudy lighting, I figured out that if you hold the button for a bit, it will turn off. However, I still haven’t been able to find any software for controlling them.
How was the computer?
When the computer first arrived at my door, it was well packaged in a box with a decent amount of foam. Even the computer’s interior was protected by a piece of expanding foam to ensure the cooler and the GPU didn’t rattle around during transport.
When I first opened the box, there was a one-page document with five easy-to-follow setup steps. Then, inside the PC, there was another document explaining how to remove the internal packaging and recommending you keep the box and packaging materials in case you need to return it for a warranty claim. On the back of the PC, there was also a large sticker that said “Plug monitor cables in graphics card ports” and had an arrow pointing to the GPU ports to help ensure that people don’t plug into the motherboard by mistake.
All of this was easy to follow, and I had my computer up and running in a few minutes. Once I had it turned on, I was happy to see no bloatware inside, and all the software and drivers were up to date. Even in the BIOS, the XMP profile was enabled for the RAM, and the fan curves all seemed to be set up nicely. Resizable BAR was also enabled. All of these things are fairly complex for the average person, so it’s nice to see all of that ready to go out of the box.
This is really why you might want to buy a prebuilt computer from a company like Quoted Tech. The hassle of picking parts, setting up the software, and all of the complex parts of the process are taken care of. You just unbox the machine, plug it in and start downloading games or whatever apps you might want to use. It’s dead simple, and if you don’t want to spend a few hours researching PC parts, a few hours building the machine and a few hours tweaking the software when you set it up, then this route is worth the added cost.
After I used the PC for a bit, I decided to take the side panels off to take a peek inside. First of all, I will say I was pleasantly surprised by the case that the company chose. It’s a Montach Air 100, and the tempered glass side panel is on hinges, so it opens and closes like a little door. This makes it extremely easy to get into the computer’s main body. The back panel is just a couple of screws, and when I took it off, I was greeted by space to store two SATA SSDs and a single HDD hard drive. Not to mention that all the cables were well routed and organized. There is even a single SATA cable already routed from the motherboard in case you wanted to bring over a drive from your previous machine.
All in all, the hardware was quite pleasing, and there were a lot of good choices and attention to detail in the unit I received. There’s even a physical button on the top of the machine that the team set up to toggle the RGB lights through a few pre-set colours. The one drawback I would have liked to see would have been at least one USB-C port on the machine somewhere just for a little bit of future proofing, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a huge detractor from the overall experience.
But how does it game?
You can tweak these fps values much higher by using DLSS and frame generation, which allows you to turn on a lot of the pretty ray tracing features or game at 4K.
I’m happy to report that it’s great. The 5070 was able to play every modern game I threw at it with relative ease. The only minor hangup was when I tried to play the new Indiana Jones at maxed out settings with its next level of ray tracing. Since the 5070 only has 12GB of video RAM, it could only play the game with full path tracing at 1440p with a few of the other settings like the texture pool lowered down a bit, and the Nvidia frame generation and DLSS turned on.
Before you gawk too much, you could play this game at high frame rates without ray tracing, or at 1080p, but in my opinion, you need to take advantage of Nvidia’s software for the best experience. And honestly, once you start playing, it all just works. If you have frame generation turned up to 4X and DLSS set to performance mode, and you’re trying to play at 4K, things are going to look and perform badly, but keeping all of the software performance-enhancing settings to a minimum can help a lot while still making the game you’re playing look fantastic.
Running the machine through Geekbench, it scored quite high, and the plethora of fans in the case kept it cool even during my prolonged gaming sessions. When playing Alan Wake 2 at 1440p high settings, I was able to get 60fps or more, and it looks fantastic in HDR on my OLED TV.
Running Cyberpunk 2077 through the in-game benchmark at 1440p on the ‘Ray tracing Low’ preset with no scaling or software enhancements, I got around 56fps on average. Turning all of the settings up to their max and enabling Path Tracing while using ray reconstruction, DLSS, and Frame generation nets me 85fps, and when I’m playing, I don’t notice anything different except for the fact that the game looks great.
It’s safe to say that with this machine and the 5070, you’ll be able to play pretty much any game at pretty high settings for years to come. Truthfully, the game I’ve been playing the most is Red Dead Redemption 2, fully maxed out at 4K, and it’s been glorious. I was also able to max out The Last of Us Part 2 when using DLSS, and it looks incredible.
Like many have already said before, it would be nice if the 5070 had a couple more gigabytes of video RAM, but if you’re coming from an older card like the 12GB 3060 that I was using, this is a substantial upgrade. With my old card, I could play games at 1440p using DLSS, and all the modern games I tried to play were fine. I would even say they looked good. However, it was starting to show its age in some titles. In Star Wars: Outlaws, when riding the speeder, the long grass would mush together when using DLSS since the game needed to render at such a low resolution to upscale to 1440p.
The RTX 5070 is actually a pretty reasonably sized card.
With the 5070, everything runs a lot sharper and faster. It also has access to better DLSS 4 and a new tech called Multi Frame Generation that uses AI to insert fake frames between the real frames to up your frame rate artificially. It’s not perfect, but it’s not awful, and while you likely don’t need it for most games right now, I think it will allow you to game on this card for more than five years into the future.
And whenever you feel like you can’t use it anymore to keep up with modern games, it should be fairly easy to upgrade this PC since it’s made out of off-the-shelf parts. Sometimes, with pre-built computers from companies like Dell, there are custom parts that make it tricky to upgrade them in the future. With something like this, the door is always open to upgrades. That being said, the model I got only has a 650-watt power supply, so if you want to upgrade your graphics card to something more powerful in the future, there’s a huge chance you’ll also need to swap out the power unit to make sure you can provide the new GPU enough juice.
A great PC with room to grow
When I first started to get into PC gaming when I was 18, I brought a hand-me-down power supply and computer case from my grandma to my local PC shop in my hometown and asked them to build me whatever they could for $600 or less without a GPU.
Realistically, I just wanted a desktop at my desk in university, but that was my first tiny step into PC building. Later that year, I bought an GTX 1050 and jammed it in the unit, learning a little more about PC building in the process. Then, maybe another six months after that, I saved up some money and finally bought all new parts and rebuilt the computer from scratch. I learned a little more that time again, and from there I’ve built six or seven PCs, getting a little better at it each time.
All of that is to say, if you want to get into PC gaming, a pre-built that uses off-the-shelf parts is a good place to start. It lets you tinker with it, upgrade it, and you can avoid the daunting task of trying to buy a bunch of parts that are all compatible. Stepping into the hobby this way lets you start playing games as soon as the computer arrives, and ideally, in a few years, once you need to upgrade, you’ll have learned enough about PCs to perhaps tackle the upgrade yourself.
And if you really have no ambitions to build or learn about computers, you should still get one of these simply for the fact that they’re Canadian and the prices are pretty decent for pre-built computers. Quoted Tech sells the unit I tested for $2,449, but others are cheaper. However, they come with less powerful graphics cards, and I think anyone buying a PC to game for the next five years will want a GPU with at least 12GB of VRAM.
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