Palicomp Phoenix i5 Z68 Warrior review

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.