Braebo Selene review

The star of the show in this system is the Best Buy-winning AMD Radeon HD 7870 graphics card. The model used here is produced by Asus and has 2GB of RAM. It’s equipped with four outputs: two DVI, one DisplayPort and one HDMI. The Selene produced an average frame rate of 74.7fps in Dirt Showdown and 29.9fps in Crysis 2, and both tests were conducted at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 at Ultra quality. This shows that the card can comfortably handle many games at the highest settings, but you’ll have to reduce graphics quality settings and possibly the resolution to play more graphically challenging such as Crysis 3.

The Selene’s Intel Core i5-4670K processor is overclocked to 4.2GHz and produced a great overall score of 128 in our application benchmarks, so you shouldn’t have a problem running any popular application. The Core i5-4670K is cooled by Arctic Cooling’s Freezer 13 heat sink. It’s one of our favourite coolers and is very quiet. There’s an intake fan behind the front panel and plenty of room for air to circulate inside the case.

The Cooler Master K380 case is a plain, workmanlike affair, but it’s well finished inside and out and the top and bottom vents are covered with grilles to help keep dust and fluff out. There are additional fan mountings points at the rear of the PC and on the Perspex side panel.

A 500W Corsair PSU provides enough power for the current configuration, but if you plan on adding a more powerful graphics card or a great deal of extra storage, more power may be required in the future. Also bear in mind that the drive cage can’t be removed from this case to make room for full-length expansion cards.

This is a powerful and well-made PC that handles current games well. The Selene is a great PC, but we’d have liked an SSD included. A good alternative is the Best Buy-winning Palicomp Sniper Elite2 Gamer, which has an SSD and Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 graphics card in its £809 configuration.