Palicomp Alpha Blade review

APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

The processor’s Intel Core i5-3570K processor has been overclocked to 4.6GHz. That’s a hefty overclock, if not as sky-high as the Wired2Fire Diablo Predator’s 4.7GHz. The chip’s kept cool by a large Thermaltake processor cooler, and 148 in our application benchmarks puts this PC right at the top of our performance charts.

The Alpha Blade is also very quick in games. The Radeon HD 7950 graphics card may be large, need two PCI Express power connectors and make a bit of a whoosh, but you can’t argue with its gaming performance. The card’s been overclocked from the standard 800MHz to 950MHz, which led to a smooth 36.1fps in our demanding Crysis 2 test, which we ran at 1,920×1,080 with Ultra detail and the high-resolution texture pack installed.

GAMING PERFORMANCE

We couldn’t get our normal Dirt 3 test to run under Windows 8 (previous tests of the Radeon HD 7950 have shown 90fps in this benchmark), so we switched to the more modern Dirt Showdown. This is a much more challenging benchmark than Dirt 3, but even at 1,920×1,080, 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra detail the Alpha Blade managed 41.1fps in this test. This PC will have no problems with current-generation games at maximum settings, and the power supply’s twin eight-pin power connectors and rated 850W capacity means you won’t have a problem if you need to upgrade the graphics card in the future.

MONITOR

Games certainly look great on the PC’s Asus VS247H display, thanks to the high brightness levels and punchy contrast of its TN panel. Its gloss chassis also makes it look smarter than many budget screens, and it has a useful tilt adjustment on its stand. Horizontal viewing angles are wide, but there’s some distinct colour shift when you move vertically, so you’ll need that tilt adjustment.

The monitor could display 98.4% of the sRGB colour gamut before calibration, and 98.8% after we’d run our Dispcalgui calibration program with a Spyder4Express colour calibrator. However, we weren’t so convinced in our subjective tests, where reds had a slight orange hue. It’s a fun monitor to use, but we’ve seen better overall image quality from IPS panels such as the AOC i2352Vh included with the Wired2Fire Diablo Predator and Scan Value G31.

CONCLUSION

Palicomp’s first Windows 8 PC may not look particularly posh, but it gets the internals right. It’s a seriously powerful PC with excellent desktop and graphics performance, as well as a useful 2TB of storage for your files. If you’re after a better monitor and smarter chassis we’d recommend the Scan Value G31, but if performance is all, the Alpha Blade is the PC to buy.