Starforge Voyager Pro review

When it comes to gaming PCs, size is, of course, everything. Weight too. You just know you're going to get a better experience from something you can barely lift, and which takes up as much space as a small refrigerator or drinks cabinet, than you are from something more slender and—dare I say it—portable.

There's a bit of truth to this, as a larger case has more room for airflow, and a bigger PC can simply take larger components (and the top end of the graphics card hierarchy can get surprisingly big) but as anyone who's used the Acer Predator Helios 18 knows, size isn't everything.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the Starforge Voyager Pro is a bit large. You're also not going to want to be carrying it around much. It's not just that the Lian Li O11D Evo RGB is tall—I'm used to tower PC cases coming up to my knee—but it's wide too. It's the sort of thing that might be called a workstation, if it didn't have two glass panels and a rim of RGB lighting around it. That does make it look rather like someone's corner office in a corporate tower block, lit up for the holidays.

Oh, and the bathroom scales show it as weighing almost 23 kg, or just over 50 lbs, though it honestly feels heavier when you're trying to carry it up the stairs and I wouldn't be surprised if the scales are lying to me again. There's a graphic behind the motherboard that shows Saturn—or some other ringed planet—and which certainly doesn't belong on the PC of an architect or engineer. There are a number of caseprints available from Starforge, tying in to games or just looking cool, along with platelights, wall art, and desk mats to match.

The CPU cooler—an AIO that connects to a triple-fan array at the top of the case—has a nice effect etched into it that looks like it descends into infinite depths, while the RAM and of course the coolers light up. It's a PC that's been made to be looked at, and deserves a place where it can be seen rather than on the floor. The problem becomes clearing space for its enormous size.

The large case comes with a surprisingly small motherboard, which means there's plenty of space for that planetary background to peek around it. There are no front or rear fans, just that top cooler and another triple-fan section at the bottom, which must be blocked almost completely by the GPU. It's a PNY GeForce 4080 Super, and the X670 Tomahawk motherboard comes from MSI, which also handles the A1000G Gold PSU. The 32 GB of DDR5-6000 RAM is from T-Force, and the CPU is the full-fat AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D. It's a potent combination, though one that's perhaps asking for two things: a doubling of the RAM, especially for anyone looking to use it as a content creation PC, and an eventual upgrade to an RTX 5000 card.

That is incoming, with the RTX 5080 version on sale from the end of January this year, though it will be in more limited numbers, at least around launch, and we've no details on what exactly that will do to the already high price of this RTX 4080 Super version. Given they're meant to have the same $999 MSRP, you'd hope not much, but the almost inevitable launch scarcity of the RTX 50-series means the standard rules of supply and demand will likely drive the pricing up.

There's a full review of the Ryzen 7 9800X3D on the site if you want the specifics, but the broad strokes is that this eight-core chip is probably the best CPU for gaming at the time of writing, thanks to its high clock speed (5.2 GHz boost, unlocked for overclocking) and its layer of second-gen 3D V-Cache.

Storage is handled by a 2 TB SSD, a PCIe 4.0 model rated for a minimum read speed of 7000 MB/s. It does okay in tests, at about the same speed as other PCIe 4.0 drives, in fact, but the motherboard supports PCIe 5.0 so there's another upgrade path available, should it ever be required. 2 TB is already quite a lot of games, but the time may come when more is required, and the extra bandwidth is there.

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Just for fun, I put Cyberpunk 2077 into Ray Tracing Overdrive mode at 4K and with DLSS on, and got an average of 57.6 fps, which just goes to underline what we already knew: the RTX 4080 Super is a highly capable card.

Better than an RTX 4070, worse than an RTX 4090, right where it's expected to be. Its average temperature under load comes in lower than RTX 4070 Super and RTX 4090 cards that have been on test, suggesting the combo of cooling system and case space provide good heat dissipation.

There is, however, somewhere the Voyager Pro outperforms some RTX 4090-based systems, and that's with Baldur's Gate 3. This is one of the best examples of a game that scales beautifully with superior gaming CPUs. And that Ryzen 7 9800X3D is the best around, and it absolutely flies with the Starforge machine in BG3.

Compared to the HP Omen 35L, with a similar RTX 4080 Super inside it, this machine is streets ahead in one of the best games of the past few years. It's also ahead of another HP Omen I've tested with an RTX 4090 and Core i9 13900K inside it. And not by a little way; I'm talking about nearly 50 fps ahead.

There's a downside to this: it's loud. During shader compilation in Black Myth: Wukong, its fans spin up to what's quite possibly their top speed, and while it's not a harsh sound that will grate on your ears, you'll definitely notice it. The extra space in the case may be acting as a resonance chamber to amplify the noise, but whatever's going on, there is a lot of heat being dumped. The sound is that of oiled bearings spinning in perfect alignment, and it's actually kind of satisfying to hear.

When playing a game, thankfully it drops to a lower level, unless ray tracing or other heavy duty workloads are required, but the GPU is noticeably louder than the CPU cooler. This means that at idle the PC can sit relatively unobtrusively—or as unobtrusive as 23 kg of black plastic and metal festooned with lights can be—until you need to draw on its power.

The 'Pro' in the PC's name suggests Starforge has more than gaming in mind for the PC, and indeed in Photoshop's AI denoising, which can be a painful experience on integrated graphics, especially with the 60 MP raw files you get these days, it whips through in less than 10 seconds each. And there's an Elite model (Core i9/64GB/RTX 4090) that costs even more if you want to charge it to your company.

A huge gaming PC like this makes a statement. It speaks of your need for massive processing power, it yells from the rooftops that you take gaming and other graphics-intensive applications very seriously indeed. It also suggests you can deadlift a lot of weight, especially if you live on an upper floor, but the investment here may be better off being deferred for a few months, to see what RTX 50-series cards do to the price of an otherwise impressive build.