Xidax X-6 gaming PC review

The best gaming PCs come in all shapes and sizes. There's small and compact systems, with minimalist, understated design. And then there's big, hulking machines that command the presence of a room, dazzling with their glowing lights and imposing stature. The Xidax X-6 fits onto the latter half of that spectrum. 

Let's start with the outside. The X-6 I tested uses Be Quiet!'s Dark Base 700 case, which features large smoky tempered glass panels and Tron-like lights adorning the front. The system is big—21.5 x 9.5 x 20.5 inches—and relatively understated considering the gleaming lights on the front. This is somewhat due to the smoky, semi-translucence of the panels, which give a shadowy look at the glowing components inside—namely the MSI RTX 2080 Gaming X Trio GPU, G.Skill Trident Z RAM, and Corsair 120mm LL RGB fans, all of which gleam with a rainbow of RGB lighting.

The backbone of the X-6's internals is an MSI MEG Z390 Ace motherboard, paired with an Intel Core i7-8700K processor. For storage, a 500GB Xidax Performance NVMe SSD pairs with a 1TB Western Digital Blue 7200 RPM HDD. I already mentioned the GPU, RAM (16GB, 3200MHz) and fans. Rounding things out is an AlphaCool Eisbaer 360mm AIO liquid cooler and an 850W Corsair PSU. And to make everything look clean and nice, Xidax used uni-sleeved black and white cables.

The case design is solid, though accessing the internals requires unscrewing thumbscrews (thankfully no screwdriver required) and removing the glass panel. It's not the worst method of access, but less convenient than the magnetic doors found on some premium prebuilts. Inside, the white-sleeved cables elegantly accent the RGB lights found on the three radiator fans up top, the Trident Z RGB RAM, and of course the MSI Gaming X GPU itself, which is held up by a support bracket that I mistook for a second GPU in SLI at first glance. 

The Xidax X-6 performed as expected for a system with an i7-8700K and RTX 2080 in our gaming benchmarks. At 1080p ultra, our demanding set of games easily stayed above 100 fps except in the case of the super-punishing Ghost Recon: Wildlands, which averaged 76 fps on the in-game benchmark. Shadow of the Tomb Raider returned a score of 116 fps, while Total War: Warhammer II scored 104 fps. Finally the X-6 scored 21573 in 3DMark Fire Strike.

Moving up to 1440p Ultra, the system still managed to stay above 60fps in all three games, though at 4K the scores dropped to the 38-43 fps range. This is, of course, scores for extremely demanding games and using the highest available in-game preset, so gaming at 1440p or 4K is entirely doable on the X-6 if you don't mind dropping a few settings a bit. 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra (1440p) scored 12166, while Fire Strike Ultra (4K) scored 6439.

While everything about the X-6 screams gaming machine, it scored admirably in productivity benchmarks as well. CineBench R15 scored 1386 in multi-threaded performance, and 191 for single-thread. Storage performance was solid too: 1706/781 in CrystalDisk QD32 Sequential Read/Write. Finally, the system scored 5031 in PCMark 10 Express.

Of course, all that performance comes with a hefty price tag. The X-6 I tested costs $3,059 as configured, while you could assemble a near-identical system for less than $2,500 by buying the parts individually and building it yourself. What you get for that extra $500 is the cost of assembly—which looks fantastic thanks to all the custom cable sleeving—and, more importantly, Xidax's lifetime warranty on parts and service. There are, of course, lower (and higher) priced configs of the X-6, but they all come with the same lifetime warranty. That's an impressive guarantee, and absolutely worth considering if you're in the market for a new prebuilt gaming PC.