STEIGER DYNAMICS LEET Reference Review

STEIGER DYNAMICS LEET Reference Review

Living Room PC

STEIGER DYNAMICS endeavors to bring you the most immersive entertainment experience possible with exquisite, high-end PCs designed for use in the comfort of your living room. This company’s handcrafted living room PCs are much more than your average HTPC. For example, the LEET Reference Living Room PC sent to us features two EVGA GeForce GTX TITAN Z graphics cards. STEIGER DYNAMICS CEO Martin Gossner says, “This kind of graphics horsepower allows for ultra-quality native 4K gaming with constant 60-plus frame rates, and doing this on a large-screen 4K TV with real surround sound is the most immersive form of gaming possible.” Of course, the LEET Reference delivers media center functionality, too, so you can watch live TV and Blu-ray Discs and stream multimedia.

A great living room PC starts with an elegant case. STEIGER DYANMICS engineers its own chassis, and the LEET is a full aluminum case made from a one-piece, 0.2-inch-thick shell. The exterior is hand-brushed, and then all the parts are anodized to produce the final color and striking finish. The unit’s looks certainly blend in with modern A/V receivers and pre-amps. At the front 

of the case, STEIGER DYNAMICS installs a 7-inch screen that runs its LEET Monitor App that you can use to customize the display. It can do things like show movie and music titles or display current CPU and GPU clocks and temperatures.

We installed the LEET Reference into our home theater setup, and from eight feet away, the screen’s text was perfectly clear and readable. For control, STEIGER DYNAMICS includes Media Center remote, and obviously, the rigcan work with a wireless keyboard and mouse, as well. The LEET Reference supports control via smartphone or tablets with a compatible app, such as Remote Pad or Splashtop. STEIGER DYNAMICS even shipped us their Couchmaster Lapdesk for comfortable control of the mouse and keyboard for long gaming sessions. It seems that STEIGER DYNAMICs has a solution for everything, when it comes to remote control.

The case, display, and remote control would be part of any LEET build, but clearly, this is not a basic system. STEIGER DYNAMICS designed this rig provide us with the best possible LEET Reference. And boy, it’s a powerhouse. This rig sports an Intel Core i7-5960X overclocked to 4GHz, two EVGA GeForce GTX TITAN Z graphics cards in SLI, and 16GB of G.Skill Ripjaws 4 at 2,600MHz. The 

flagship Intel processor and 16GB ofmemory help to make this LEET Reference a great tool for video encoding and working from your couch. Gossner says that the Core i7-5960X is “especially helpful when converting Blu-rays or editing photos and videos on your 4K TV, which is an amazing and completely new way to work.”

STEIGER DYNAMICS liquidcools all of its LEET PCs, and this build features a custom loop for the processor and graphics cards. The use of liquid cooling is more than just about performance, because STEIGER believes that the most important thing for a living room PC is how quiet it runs. The company co-developed this liquid-cooling setup with Swiftech, and ASUS provides custom UEFIs with increased fan ranges to keep the system nearly silent under most loads.

In our build, STEIGER DYNAMICS uses green tubing, and you can see the entire interior through the acrylic top panel. The internals are also illuminated with purple LED strip lights. We thought 

the purple LEDs looked great when we turned off the lights in our entertainment 

room. You can choose between 11 colors of tubing and five colors of chassis lighting. STEIGER DYNAMICS also custom sleeves the power cables (all cables were sleeved in black in our build), and the sleeved cables were neatly routed for a clean look.

Audiophiles will appreciate the variety of sound processing choices available. All options support lossless audio—even the onboard audio on the ASUS ROG RAMPAGE V EXTREME in this build. There are couple of choices with discrete sound cards, including one with a DB25 connector, if that’s more your style. 

This LEET Reference will make a great PVR, because STEIGER DYNAMICS provided three 3TB Western Digital Red hard drives in RAID 5 for distributed parity. Gossner notes that the drives are certified to run 24/7, “which is perfect for people using our system to replace their NAS or home server.” The OS is installed onto two 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSDs configured in RAID 0 for 

blazing load times.Brace yourselves for these benchmark results, as the numbers are like nothing we’ve tested before. Just some of the crazy fast scores include well over 100fps in Metro: Last Light (114.75fps) and Aliens vs. Predator (128fps) when tested at 2,560 x 1,600. 3DMark Professional’s Fire Strike Extreme test delivered a score of 10943, while PCMark 8 generated a score of 5020. POV-Ray 3.7 hit 3220.24 pixels per second. Compare these scores to our X99 roundup, which is a fairly speedy test bench itself, and you’ll see the performance differences.

Our test LEET Reference is a performance dynamo, and we love the look and great functionality STEIGER DYNAMICS integrates into the chassis. The LEET Reference is ideal for gamers looking to take more advantage of the big screen and comfy couch in the entertainment area. It’s also a good fit for HTPC users with discriminating tastes, thanks to the refined appearance and media center functionality. And, of course, you can custom configure the build to match your budget and exact multimedia and gaming requirements. Once you getthis system set up, we think the hardest part might be getting away from the couch.

Specs:Processor: Intel Core i7-5960X @ 4GHz; Graphics Cards: EVGA GeForce GTX TITAN Z; Motherboard: ASUS ROG RAMPAGE V EXTREME; Memory: 16GB of G.Skill Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2600; Storage: 120GB Kingston HyperX 3K SSD (2x; RAID 0), 3TB Western Digital Red (3x; RAID 5); PSU: Seasonic SS-1250XM; OS: Windows 8.1 Professional with Windows Media Center