Starforge Systems Navigator Pre-Built PC Review

After reviewing the excellent Starforge Systems Voyager II PC a few weeks back, we’ve gone hands-on with another of the company’s offerings: the enthusiast-level Navigator PC. As a mid-tier option in Starforge’s lineup, how does it stack up, and is it worth the entry price? 

As I said in my previous review, Starforge is a builder I’ve had my eye on for a while, and I was incredibly impressed by its Voyager II PC that sits in its top-tier Creator stack of PCs. So I went into the Navigator, expecting to be impressed as well. The Navigator line seems to sit in that middle ground of PC building where you’re not getting top-shelf components like an RTX 4090 or a top-tier Ryzen or Intel CPU. Instead, the components are a bit more modest, though still plenty powerful, seemingly targeting 1440p gameplay at high framerates. 

We should note that you’ll notice that our pictures include an RTX GeForce GPU in them, though the review below will have benchmarks from an AMD Rx 7800 XT. For full disclosure, about twenty-four hours after sending the Navigator unit (more on that later), a change was made to the components in the Navigator build, replacing the old RTX 4070 with the AMD GPU listed above. As such, we swapped the GPUs out here using our own RX 7800 XT sample to give the most accurate review we possibly could in order to reflect what you’ll actually buy if you pull the trigger on the PC.

SPECS:

First Thoughts and Unboxing

Like the Voyager before it, the Navigator also arrived impeccably packed. As someone who spent ten years working in a music store that shipped multi-thousand dollar instruments to customers across the globe, knowing that my expensive purchase will be packed well and with care gives me a ton of confidence that whatever I bought won’t arrive here broken. The PC itself is carefully packed in the same carton the XPG Invader X case ships in, which is, in turn, packed well in an outer carton, complete with a comically large amount of bubble wrap.

The components