Palicomp Alpha Inferno review

While most cases have some 5 1/4in and some 3 1/2in bays, the Alpha Inferno’s case simply has a full-height bank of 5 1/4in bays, with optional mounting shelves to attach 3 1/2in or 2 1/2in drives. There’s lots of space for long graphics cards and the inner edges are all nicely finished, but the case does little to insulate system sound, has plenty of wide holes to allow dust and fluff inside and looks ugly. Fortunately, the system isn’t overly noisy.

The front panel has a couple of USB ports and the usual 3.5mm stereo microphone and headphone ports. At the back are three 3.5mm stereo outputs for analogue surround sound and an optical S/PDIF output for digital audio. There’s a Gigabit Ethernet port, PS/2 port, four USB2 ports and two USB3 ports. The impressive graphics card below the motherboard’s main backplane has a DVI port, HDMI output and a couple of mini DisplayPort outputs.

The Alpha Inferno put in a strong performance in all of our tests, acheive frame rates of 89.5fps in Dirt 3 and 41.2fps in Crysis 2. It has plenty of processor power, too, achieving an overall score of 134 in our benchmark tests.

This is an unquestionably powerful PC, which compares well to similarly priced systems. There’s an argument to be made for having a better motherboard with more SATA3 or USB3 ports, or a prettier case instead of the extra 8GB of memory, but it’s well built and everything’s fit for purpose, earning the Alpha Inferno a full five stars.