Digital Storm is one of a handful of boutique builders that will happily build you a high-end gaming PC that costs several thousand dollars, if you have the budget and desire. Not everyone does, though, so today Digital Storm announced its new Lynx family of mainstream gaming PCs starting at a reasonable $799.
This isn't actually Digital Storm's least expensive desktop line. That distinction still belongs to its Vanquish desktops, which start at $699. As far as we know, that line isn't going anywhere—it's still listed on Digital Storm's website.
So why launch another mainstream desktop line?
"Lynx is our evolution from distilling 17 years of knowledge in crafting enthusiast-class PCs for our clients. Our aim with this new launch is to deliver Digital Storm's unique brand to a more mainstream PC gamer audience. With a new in-house design, Lynx provides exclusivity not usually found at this price point by Digital Storm," the company explains.
Unlike the Vanquish, which uses what looks to be a Corsair Crystal 460X case, the Lynx houses its components in a completely custom chassis. In fact, our friends at Anandtech got the impression at CES that this custom case would be applied to the Vanquish line, but Digital Storm decided to create a new category instead.
As Digital Storm does with its other desktops, the Lynx is broken up into four different starting points—Good ($799), Better ($999), Best ($1,399), and Ultimate ($1,799). The Good, Better, and Best models are built around AMD's Ryzen hardware, while the Ultimate configuration sports an Intel Core i7-9700K processor.
All of these models feature discrete graphics as well, including the $699 configuration, which is another differentiating feature between it and the lowest priced Vanquish. It's not a barn burner though—the $799 Good model comes standard with an AMD Ryzen 3 2200G, GeForce GTX 1050, 8GB of DDR4 memory, 2TB hard drive (7,200 rpm), and a 600W power supply.
It's a bit odd to pair a Ryzen CPU with integrated Vega graphics, with a discrete graphics card, though in fairness it's significantly cheaper than something like a Ryzen 3 2300X.
On the other end of the spectrum, the $1,999 Ultimate models comes standard with an Intel Core i7-9700K, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070, 16GB of DDR4 memory, 500GB M.2 SSD + 2TB HDD, and a 750W power supply.
You could build a comparable system for less, though the markup isn't egregious for a boutique build—without factoring in a case or liquid CPU cooler, we priced an Ultimate build at around $1,600. With a nice case and cooler, that's probably closer to $1,750 (of course, you could knock that down by going with a budget chassis and taking advantage of sales and mail-in-rebates).
The Lynx line will be available to order later today.
