It’s no secret that here at PowerUp we are huge fans of Aftershock PC Australia — a custom PC builder based in St. Kilda, Victoria. From the balls-to-the-wall Explorer Showcase PC to the budget friendly Bolt, Aftershock PC handcrafts exceptional machines limited only by your price point and creativity. This time around they sent us the Hypergate Mini, a small form factor or SFF build packing the very latest AMD Ryzen 5000 CPU’s and of course Nvidia RTX 30-series graphics.
This sort of power in a tiny little box that’s about the size of a large home theatre subwoofer is just what the doctor ordered for big screen 4K 120Fps gaming in the living room. If you happen to have a TV like the amazing LG OLED 48 CX, the Hypergate makes a perfect companion. The Hypergate Mini starts at about $1,500, going way above that if you want a custom water loop system to show off to one and all.
Our review unit costs about $3,200 and comes with an AMD Ryzen 7 5600X, a Gigabyte Eagle OC RTX 3060Ti, 16GB of shiny Corsair RGB RAM, a 512GB SSD + 1TB HDD combo in beautiful NZXT H210i ITX case. This combination of parts as you can imagine leads to some truly impressive performance even capable of 4K60 in some AAA games.
Aftershock Hypergate Mini Review
Let’s start with the form factor which is as we’ve already touched on, pretty small. The NZXT H210i case isn’t the smallest ITX case out there with even the company’s own H1 case being smaller(too bad NZXT had to recall those due to the fire hazard they posed). The H210i measures 210mm wide, 334mm tall and 372mm deep making it great for fitting on small desks or besides TV cabinets.
The case itself is pretty understated coming in either Matte Black or White. It has a tempered glass side panel that pops off with ease thanks to the thumb screw. On the inside is built-in RGB lighting which you can control via the NZXT CAM app for Windows. The lighting can be as obnoxious or understated as you wish but overall I really like how it illuminates the internals.
The case is surprisingly adept at holding a variety of component sizes but you will still need to be careful when picking your own upgrades, particularly graphics cards which can’t exceed 280mm in length. And speaking of which, the Gigabyte Eagle RTX 3060Ti was a perfect size for this case, being even smaller than NVIDIA’s reference design. An Aorus B550 Pro AX ITX motherboard holds the GPU, RAM and CPU together while also providing on board WiFi 6 and NVMe M.2 slot for your system drive.
Aftershock provides a self-branded SSD with a 3500MB/s read and 3000MB/s write speeds which while not as fast as the new Xbox Series X/S or PlayStation 5, it’s still blazing fast for everything you can throw at it. In fact, I was hard pressed to find myself in any situation where the Hypergate Mini choked.
The Ryzen 5 5600X is cooled by a custom 240mm AIO with the Aftershock logo in a stunning mirror finish. Pretty looks aside, it kept the processor very cool — I barely saw over 70C when under intense use. The bigger concern though was the GPU which easily reached max temperatures of 82C in gaming, especially when you turn up the ray tracing and 4K resolutions.
This is unfortunately one downside of SFF cases which have limited airflow that leads to higher temps. Taking off the glass panel will buy you a degree or two less but slapping in some bigger fans would be wise. I was able to drop that down by a few degrees to about 77C after undervolting the GPU using MSI Afterburner. Nevertheless, overall performance was exceptional and our benchmark scores prove it. The 5600X just chews through everything with some scores I’ve never seen in all my time reviewing — coming close to much more expensive 8-core processors like the Intel i9-9900K.
When it comes to games, the RTX 3060Ti showed off NVIDIA’s tremendous leaps in generational performance with some of the highest 3DMark11 scores I’ve recorded. The same was true for real games where the 3060Ti was happiest at 1080p and 1440p ultra settings but since I had the incredible LG 48 CX OLED on hand at the same time, I had to try 4K gaming.
Surprise, surprise — the 3060Ti hit 50-60fps in most games even hitting 100fps in Doom Eternal. The fact that it can run Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Metro Exodus in 4K with Ray Tracing at 40FPS is mind boggling. I think most people will be very happy with 1440p ultra wide gaming here where all games comfortably run 80-120fps even with ray tracing enabled. And yes, in case you were wondering, CyberPunk 2077 ran very well, averaging the same 40-50FPS at 1440P Ultra Ray Tracing.
Verdict
The Aftershock Hypergate Mini is yet another winner from the company. I love me some SFF cases not just because they look amazing, but they save a ton of space. Having one that performs this good while remaining so quiet is a feat of engineering that gives me goosebumps. You’ve seen the performance numbers, judge for yourself. The only concern I have is with those high GPU thermals long term but then again, it’s a PC. There’s bound to be some reddit thread with a ton of practical solutions.
And while our review unit isn’t exactly cheap at $3000, you can still get a great build for far less thanks to the flexibility of configuration options the company offers on its website. And before someone starts harping on in the comments how they could build this for less, I dare you to actually get either the 5600X or 3060Ti at this time. Not to mention the 2 year guarantee Aftershock PC offers.
So, yeah. Aftershock has delivered yet another absolute winner and I’m so sad to see it go back.
