CUK Sentinel Reviewed – Power, Simplicity, and Liquid Cooling

Ok, so the LED lighting doesn’t add speed to the CUK Sentinel, but it does add beauty. A bit of backstory – I am a previous Mac Pro user, so this machine had quite a hill to climb. Wow, am I impressed.

Six months after purchase, the machine works and plays well.

When it comes to power and value, the CUK Sentinel is no small contender. It’s hard to compare hardware, as this is not “apples to apples”, but pound for pound and dollar for dollar if given the chance to get a new Mac Pro or another CUK Sentinel, I’d probably go for the CUK Sentinel, and here’s why – value. To get similar specs from a Mac I’d be looking at an easy $4,000-$5,000. I ordered my machine from CUK via Amazon and it was close to $2300 shipped. Deal!

The unboxing went well. The first thing you’ll notice is that this computer does not have optical drives. Software was included for the computer, but on CD. I laughed. Thumb drives might be the next thing. I later made some.

After unboxing the CUK Sentinel, I hooked it up to the BENQ 35″ curved display and was pleasantly impressed. The Nvidia GPU had no problem at all hitting the 144hz refresh rate supported by the BENQ. This was a solid start. Next, I began the painstaking process of installing apps for work, and of course, for play. I installed the entire Adobe suite including Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Lightroom, Dreamweaver, and Muse. I installed a variety of audio production and mastering tools to include Reaper, Sonar, and Reason. If it was a digital media production tool, I installed it. There is so much more software available for PC.

Of course, I also installed Steam and began downloading some games to benchmark the machine. My first go-to choice for benchmarking was Doom, by Bethesda Software. Anyone familiar with Doom knows that Ultra settings can be a nightmare for many machines. The CUK Sentinel ran Doom at Ultra settings and achieved frame rates of 112-136 frames per second. Mission success. Motion was extremely smooth, even at the BENQ’s default resolution of 2560×1080.

Great job, Marine.

Since then I have added many games to the collection and have always been pleased with the visuals and performance. The GTX 1080 series video cards truly are outstanding. I’ve also rendered video quite often with Adobe Premiere and After Effects. Unfortunately, the card is not natively supported but you can edit the CUDA configuration within your adobe folder to manually add the card. This allows Adobe to work with the 1080 series Pascal GPU. Performance there is good.

Video Editing and Production with Sentinel

I would recommend to anyone hoping to use the CUK Sentinel for video production that an additional 500gb – 1TB SSD scratch drive is added. The boot SSD is too small and the 4TB hybrid drive is too slow. Rendering still works fine, but, is slowed if you use the HDD as your primary scratch drive like I did. Secondard SSD drive options are now available if ordering from the CUK website.

CUK Sentinel Specifications

MB: MSI Z170A Pro Carbon
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K Quad Core
GPU: ASUS GeForce GTX 1080 8GB
RAM: 32GB DDR4-2133 DIMM
SSD: 500GB Seagate
HDD: 4TB Seagate Hybrid
Cooler: CORSAIR Hydro Series H60
Case: NZXT S340 CA-S340MB-GB
LED: Blue LED Lights

The CUK Sentinel is a fantastic desktop computer boasting Nvidia graphics, a powerful Intel Skylake processor, plenty of ram, lots of storage, and performance capable of extreme gaming or serious studio production.

The CUK Sentinel was a great purchase. If you need a machine ready for both work and play, this could be the machine for you. It has performed great for me.

Visit the CUK website:
https://cukusa.com/

The post CUK Sentinel Reviewed – Power, Simplicity, and Liquid Cooling appeared first on ROB.

Source: http://bit.ly/2qcTqaU