Wired2Fire Diablo Value Select review

The Wired2Fire Diablo Value Select is a compact PC with an Intel Core i3 processor. Remarkably for a £500 system, it also has a decent PCI-E graphics card. This is for the best, as the Core i3’s on-chip graphics aren’t as capable of those of the new AMD “Kaveri” A-series processors.

It’s likely because of the cost of this extra hardware that the system makes do with a distinctly no-frills case, with a plain metal interior. Despite this, there aren’t any sharp edges anywhere and the PC’s small size makes it easy to stash somewhere unobtrusive. The case’s perforated side panel doesn’t provide much dust or sound proofing to speak of, but the system is very quiet when idle anyway. There’s just one near-silent case fan mounted behind the front panel.

This fan is level with the graphics card, but there’s still room to upgrade further if you want a graphics card with a little more oomph, with just under 300mm clear between the rear of the case and the front fan. Above the fan are three 3 1/2in drive bays, one of them external, and two 5 1/4in bays. One of each is occupied, by a 1TB hard disk and DVD-RW drive respectively. The case doesn’t provide much scope for routing cables neatly, but the inside of the case was nonetheless very tidy. The 500W FSP PSU is well up to the task of powering all the installed components, and will even have enough oomph for a powerful replacement graphics card.

The motherboard has just four SATA3 ports, which means only two are available for any future storage upgrades. There’s no USB3 header on the board, but the case’s front panel only has USB ports anyway. At the back of the PC are three 3.5mm stereo outputs that can be configured for 5.1 analogue surround sound, a pair of PS/2 ports for your mouse and keyboard and six USB ports, of which two are USB3.

The Asus H81M-E motherboard doesn’t have a huge range of internal options for expansion. The PCI-E x16 slot is already occupied and the graphics card it contains blocks one of the PCI-E x1 slots, leaving a single vacant PCI-E x1 slot. A PCI-E x1 slot is more useful than the PCI slots you find at the bottom of many motherboards, though.

There are just two memory slots, each of which contains a 4GB module of 1,600MHz RAM. 8GB is absolutely fine for a home PC, but should you wish to upgrade in the future, you’ll have to replace the existing RAM. The processor is a dual-core 3.4GHz Intel Core i3-4130. It performs similarly to the AMD Kaveri processors found in many home PCs at this price, producing an overall score of 67 in our application benchmarks.