One of the Best Pre-Built PCs We’ve Reviewed: $1700 Thermaltake Vista 470M

The main interior of the build has a clean assembly, though we did notice 2 loose RGB headers with one of them having a bent pin. It still worked, but that isn’t great.

Thankfully, we didn’t notice any loose screws, which is pretty rare to see.

Our 470M used a lower quality 450-watt 12VHPWR cable for its GPU. Fortunately the GPU in our system, a 4070 Super (read our review), won’t pull something higher like 600 watts, but this will prevent GPU upgrade options, like the 4090 (watch our review). So that’s not great and we would have preferred a 600-watt solution.

With the CPU cooler removed, the paste on the processor looks okay. There was one corner which could have used a little more thermal paste. We can also see there was a lot of force applied to it. Thermally, it was fine in our testing. 

Back to the system review. All of this testing was completed prior to the tear-down.

BIOS, OS Setup, and Software

The BIOS didn’t have any negative surprises, and was set to stock values outside of EXPO being turned on, which is good. This should be the norm, but because companies fail at enabling EXPO and XMP so frequently, it actually becomes the mark of a prodigal system integrator. That’s a sad statement, but experience has unfortunately set low expectations. The only strange thing was the date being set to January 31, 2024, which was easily fixed. The CMOS battery did not seem to be faulty. It just looked to be misconfigured. 

There was nothing else to mention in BIOS, which is good.

Windows setup was normal, thankfully devoid of any third-party software agreements deceptively tacked on at the end. Booting into Windows was clean, without any pop-up app assault. The desktop had a screenshot of a Superposition benchmark result, indicating the system was probably tested prior to packaging. Having a result stored locally for the customer is excellent, as it offers a means to calibrate against the expectation and gives customer support a way to help direct the consumer to a performance gauge.

The only additional software on the system was the ASRock RGB utility, which provides some functionality. There was no bloatware otherwise: No Norton or McAfee, no BS gaming services, and just a clean OS.

The pre-installed NVIDIA graphics driver was version 565.90 from October 1, less than a week prior to our original order date and only three days before the 470M even went on sale. This is awesome to see: Thermaltake might be better about getting the latest version into its builds than some other SIs we’ve looked at – it’s hard to definitively say with only a single data point, but other systems we’ve reviewed have sometimes had very outdated drivers, upwards of 3 or 4 months out of date, which isn’t good.

As a downside: There was a missing driver in Device Manager. Research showed it’s AMD’s 3D V-cache driver. It should be installed but disabled with the 7800X3D. We would like to see it installed, but Thermaltake lucked into the fact that this is a single CCD CPU, so this wasn’t disastrous. It absolutely shouldn’t be missing, but Thermaltake would only truly suffer for it if this were a dual-CCD solution with 3D cache.

Altogether, Thermaltake did a great job with providing a clean BIOS and OS setup with up-to-date drivers. We really didn’t have a lot of complaints here.

We’ll get into benchmarks now.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Benchmarks

Power – Full Torture

Full system power measured at the wall is up first in our charts. This is captured while the system is running a full CPU plus GPU load with Blender and Port Royal on loop. System power consumption idles at around 60-70W and then climbs to roughly 150W during the brief CPU-only load portion, then jumps over 360W when the GPU joins in. It’s stable overall, and during our steady-state period, results in a 370W average. With an 850W PSU, Thermaltake has gone slightly overkill on the power supply, but not in a bad way. Most power supplies are at peak efficiency somewhere in the 40% to 60% range of utilization for capacity, although it depends on the power supply. 850W gives just enough headroom for an upgrade without increasing cost unnecessarily while also staying within a reasonable efficiency range.

Thermals – Full Torture

Next is a simple bar chart of all thermals at steady-state in the same workload. The GPU has plenty of access to fresh air, keeping itself to 68 degrees Celsius on the core, 75 degrees on the memory, and 80 degrees hotspot. This is all completely fine.

The CPU at steady state is 77 degrees, which is within the expected range for the 7800X3D with a competent 240mm liquid cooler. RAM SPD Hub and SSD temperatures were fine, showing a slight delta between the two RAM sticks. That’s normal.

Thermals are relatively hard to screw-up in this case since it’s so heavily perforated and includes 3 side intake fans, a 240 liquid cooler, and a rear exhaust fan. Thermaltake did not screw them up, so that’s also a good sign. Overall, the cooling configuration is good and performs well for what it is. We don’t have any problems with the CPU or GPU temperatures here.

CPU Thermals vs. Fan Speed – Full Torture

The chart above shows CPU temperature over time and plotted against fan speed. There’s an initial spike in temperature around the 200-second mark, which causes the liquid cooler’s pump (recorded as CPU1) and fan speeds to spike to control it. Outside of that initial burst, the rest of the curve is gradual, without any sudden ramps. This is all good as it should help avoid noticeable, annoying, and sudden changes in noise. Fan hysteresis seems good here.

The cooler fans topped out at 1908 RPM AVG, but the chassis fans only reached 429 RPM AVG. This is so low that we doubt they’re contributing much at all to the overall cooling. The system doesn’t really need them to be going faster, but this points to them being improperly configured.

We think it’d be better to boost these speeds at least a couple hundred RPM to make some use of the fans, as currently, they are borderline ornamental at those speeds. It would actually result in a quieter system if Thermaltake slightly dropped the speed of the higher RPM fans and slightly increased the speed of the side fans, as they’d get rid of some of the higher frequencies in the noise spectrum by reducing the higher RPM fans. This would yield a better overall balance for the system than setting a few fans high and the rest so low that they do nearly nothing.

Acoustics – Full Torture

We’ll wrap up the charts with acoustic testing. 

This is done in our hemi-anechoic chamber that we built last year. We’ve been getting a ton of use out of this chamber for testing. The reason we built the chamber is to ensure a consistent test environment day-to-day. You’d be shocked how much daily external noise changes as picked up on decibel meters, and without good controls, we wouldn’t be able to fairly test and evaluate systems against each other from day to day as the conditions would be constantly changing. Our chamber allows us to eliminate external noises that aren’t from the computer, so if there’s a truck outside or some high-pitched wind whistling or something like that, we eliminate all of it with the chamber. That means we are correctly attributing system noise to the system itself, not to our own environmental factors that aren’t present in your situation.

The image above is a plot of dBA over time during the same full system load. The average noise level during idle was 18 dBA. Noise levels during steady-state reached 31.1 dBA. What we’re really looking at here is the ramp: Thermaltake’s system ramped to full noise level over a period of about 10 minutes, which is great. That means Thermaltake isn’t unnecessarily rapidly ramping and de-ramping the fans (other than that initial spike) and is utilizing time to slowly increase the speeds. This would help control noise levels during spikier workloads.

Frequency Spectrum

Here’s a quick frequency spectrum plot with data collected in our acoustic chamber.

The Thermaltake 470M under steady state full load had its largest spikes at the 223 and 380 Hz frequencies, followed by a dip, then another small spike at 500 Hz. Overall, this noise profile is fine. There is a slight spike at 1600-1700 Hz which could be flattened a bit by lowering the pump speed and CPU cooler fan speed slightly, but overall, there’s not a lot to complain about with it.

Packaging

Thermaltake’s packaging was generally pretty good, utilizing the tried and true box-in-a-box method, but with the oddity of using GPU box foam inserts as packing material (and from a different GPU than the one in our system, no less). We have no way to know if this is routine practice or if the warehouse just ran out of the usual stuff – at least it’s recycling. The PC itself was packed inside the case box as usual.

The glass side panel was screwed in for transit, which was good, and was taped to the front glass panel, which was annoying. But at least for the positives, making use of the glass security screw is the correct move and we’re happy to see it get its proper use. 

There was a QR code linking to instructions on how to remove the side panel. This is a bit strange since it’s a lot of extra steps to get to the answer: It technically works, but a simple instructional pictograph would be a lot better since they’re printing and applying a sticker anyway, so applying a sticker with a QR code to basically a single step is a roundabout way of conveying a message in the same space as the code itself.

The inside of the case was well-packed with a mixture of both closed-cell and expanding foams. Thermaltake did an adequate job of protecting the system during shipping. Ours did not sustain any shipping damage. We were overall happy with how this was packaged. 

Accessories

Now for the accessories: The included quick start guide provides an actually helpful primer for setup, especially for novices. Step 1 clearly instructs the user to plug the monitor into the GPU and not the motherboard, which should help prevent the number one easy mistake, and it also notes to flip the PSU switch to on, which should prevent the second most common easy mistake. 

The bag of accessories inside the case has the case manual, SATA cables, WiFi antennae, extra screws, and, curiously, two 12VHPWR adapters. One of them is the official NVIDIA adapter that probably came with the 4070 Super and the other is a mismatched-white that just looks bad. Nothing in the build is white themed, so we assume this was an accidental inclusion. Including the native NVIDIA adapter is good though, as there are a lot of reasons a user may want it in the future. Keeping the card’s accessories with the card is the right move and we’re happy to see it. Some SIs just toss the extras, which could minimally pose issues for second-hand resale when done with the system.

We’re not sure if this is better or worse than the used Sharpie PRO we got from NZXT. We didn’t end up mentioning that in the NZXT video because it didn’t matter compared to the utter trainwreck that Flex is, but we actually got sent a used Sharpie in the accessory box. Maybe it’s a trap so they can charge us for the entire cost of the system if we don’t include the Sharpie upon return.

Anyway, at least in reference to this, Thermaltake is looking good. We were overall satisfied with the accessories included.

Thermaltake Vista 470M Conclusion

The quick version of the conclusion is this: The Thermaltake Vista 470M pre-built is one of the best we’ve looked at recently, alongside the Starforge Lowkey. It’s also the best value for money we’ve seen since probably the Maingear Vybe in 2022 (watch our review). The upcharge over DIY is only about $100, which is pretty much as good as it gets outside of major SI clearance sales. And even with the more recent sales since we bought the system, it might be at most $200 to $250 upcharge. 

Part selection makes sense outside of the slow DDR5-5600 – matching a still-excellent and efficient last-gen X3D CPU with the upper-midrange 4070 Super. It ends up being a good build. Thermaltake also doesn’t back the user into any corners with something like a proprietary motherboard that won’t get regular BIOS updates, which is good. The 850W PSU leaves overhead for a GPU upgrade down the road.

Now that the 9800X3D is out for effectively the same price, we’d like to see Thermaltake update the SKU with the new CPU and keep MSRP the same.

Build quality is overall good: Cable management was well-done, with the only major negative of the assembly being a bent RGB header.

The system’s setup was also a major positive for Thermaltake. The BIOS was sensibly configured and the Windows 11 install was clean, with impressively fresh GPU drivers. The only oddity there was a missing X3D driver that’s only necessary to the dual CCD parts, which the 7800X3D isn’t. As general best practice, we still like to see all drivers installed and no yellow bangs (!) in the device manager.

Thermals across the whole build are well managed, with CPU and GPU temperatures within expected ranges. Fan curves and acoustics are also good, with the one exception being the chassis fans never ramping up. 

Thermaltake could improve upon its fan configuration by reducing the CPU speeds in the curve and increasing the case panel speeds, which would slightly lower noise and create a more desirable acoustic profile, but with the same thermal results.

We’re overall impressed with this system. After how many bad prebuilts we’ve looked at recently, we specifically went hunting for good ones and bought several. Of those, one was bad — and that’s coming up soon — and another coming up looks promising. This one went well. This is our first Thermaltake prebuilt we’ve bought. We’d feel comfortable recommending this one. It’s a big plus to see AMD in use where it makes sense too, as a lot of the system integrators and OEMs are still embedded with Intel.

Well done to Thermaltake. We’ll probably give this system to someone we know since we expect it won’t come back with any problems.

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