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We’ve seen several very powerful overclocked PCs recently, thanks to Intel’s multiplier-unlocked Core i5-2500K processor. At lower prices – around the £800 mark – manufacturers have to make compromises to afford the processor, such as a cheaper case or less capable graphics card. Palicomp’s i5 Z68 Warrior may cost £1,200, but it doesn’t suffer from a compromised spec. The PC has a 2GB AMD Radeon 6970 graphics card, a Blu-ray drive, a tank-like Cooler Master CM 690 II case and a 2TB hard disk with an additional 64GB solid state drive that, instead of acting as storage, is configured as an hard disk cache using Intel’s Smart Response Technology (SRT), which is designed to speed up hard disk access times.
The dramatically overclocked processor runs at 4.8GHz, and powered the Warrior through our benchmark tests with an overall score of 142. That’s among the highest we’ve seen and indicates that the PC is more than powerful enough to run any consumer software, as well as several packages at once. This PC will have performance to spare for a few years to come. The system also has a huge 16GB of memory. We’re not quite sure what you’d use it for – it’s more than our benchmarks’ multi-tasking tests can accurately reflect – but if you ever feel the need to run multiple virtual machines, get heavily into ray-tracing or edit hundreds of images at time, this massive chunk of RAM will be here for you.
The 2GB AMD Radeon 6970 graphics card is more than up to the task of handling games, with a blistering 62.5fps in the DirectX 11 STALKER test and 75.6fps in Crysis. We couldn’t get our Dirt 3 benchmark to run, though, due to a problem with the current version of AMD’s driver. The Warrior’s MSI-branded graphics card has a pair of DVI ports, one HDMI output and two Mini DisplayPort connections. This means it can handle up to four monitors in Eyefinity mode.
The PC runs surprisingly quietly – there’s a low, audible hum, but it wasn’t enough to bother us, even at heavy load. Part of the credit for this goes to the well-insulated, and extremely heavy, case, and part to the quiet CPU cooler. The case’s ventilation holes are also protected largely against fluff by mesh covers – a real plus if you have cats, carpet, or both.
Although the PC is already feature-packed, there’s plenty of room to add more. One PCI-E x1 slot is blocked by the graphics card, but that still leaves another two, plus a pair of PCI slots and a PCI-E x16 slot. The obvious upgrade would be a sound card for better audio quality, as the PC comes with Logitech’s cost-effective but excellent S220 2.1 speakers, but only has the on-board Realtek audio codec chip.
All the motherboard’s memory slots are taken up, and only three of the Gigabyte Z68X-UD3P 3B motherboard’s SATA ports are empty – the spare ones are all SATA2, as all four SATA3 ports are occupied. You’ll only take advantage of SATA3’s extra speed if you fit extra SSDs, though – there are still enough SATA ports for extra hard disks and optical drives, and there are four spare 3 1/2in bays and three 5 1/4in bays to fit them. If you prefer to keep things external, there are a total of 14 USB ports – 12 at the back and two at the front, and four of the rear ports are USB3. There’s also a FireWire port at the back, an eSATA port at the front, and a SATA caddy built into the top of the PC to let you transfer files to a SATA hard disk without opening the case.
The Warrior comes with a 24in Samsung B2430L monitor. It’s bright and has a matt display, so doesn’t suffer so much from reflections as gloss monitors. Colours are fairly even, although black tones aren’t quite as deep as some 24in displays we’ve seen and its backlighting is uneven around the edges. The only point where Palicomp has obviously saved money is on the keyboard and mouse – the Labtec wireless set aren’t very comfortable to use, and the keyboard in particular feels loose and rattly.
The Warrior is an outstanding system, with brilliant build quality, a good choice of monitor and speakers, and excellent performance. The main question is whether you can do better for the money. The Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire has a similar specification and overclock – minus the speakers and with only 4GB RAM – for just £999. Unless you really need the SSD caching or additional disk space and memory, the Hellspawn is a better buy. The Z68 Warrior comes very close to an award, though.
