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The i5 OCT comes in a hefty case that’s smartly finished and has reasonable sound insulation. Most of its ventilation grilles are covered in fine mesh to keep the dust out, although two on the side panel are uncovered. The system is liquid-cooled. This takes up much less space than most traditional CPU coolers, but it’s not as quiet as you might expect, and has a distinctive pulsing hum. Six internal 3½in drive bays slide out on drawers, making it easy to add hard disks. One bay holds a 2TB hard disk, while two of the 5¼in bays are occupied by a Blu-ray reader, DVD writer drive and a memory card reader.
The i5 OCT uses a Core i5-2500K processor, overclocked to a whopping 4.8GHz. This paid dividends in our tests, where the PC achieved an outstanding overall score of 145. The graphics card – a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti – isn’t in the same league as the processor, but managed a respectable 36.3fps in Crysis and 26.2fps in STALKER. It’s good enough to play any current game at reasonably high quality settings, but these aren’t the best scores to be found at this price.
The ever-popular Asus P8P67 motherboard feels even more spacious than usual, thanks to the compact water cooler. All four memory slots are easily accessible; two are currently occupied by 2GB DDR3 modules running at 1,600MHz. The motherboard has three PCI slots, two PCI-E x16 slots and two PCI-E x1 slots. As usual, one of the x1 slots is blocked by the graphics card. There are eight SATA ports, but all four SATA III ports are currently in use, leaving four empty SATA II ports.
Two of the occupied SATA III ports connect to the top of the case, where you’ll find an eSATA port and a shallow receptacle that accommodates an internal SATA drive directly to the outside of the case. There are also two USB ports on the top of the case, in addition to one that’s built into the memory card reader at the front. There are another ten USB ports at the back, including two USB3 ports. There’s also an eSATA port and a FireWire port, as well as the usual pair of PS/2 ports, 7.1 analogue surround sound connectors and optical S/PDIF output.
The i5 OCT comes with an excellent wireless keyboard and mouse set – Logitech’s MK710. A padded wrist rest and flat keys make the keyboard comfortable to use for hours on end, while the mouse is ergonomically shaped for the right-handed use. The 22in BenQ G2222HDL monitor produced excellent contrast, even backlighting and accurate colours, but we’d have preferred a larger display.
The i5 OCT is massively overclocked and its liquid cooling means that you won’t have to work around a bulky heat sink if you want to upgrade. We also appreciate the 2TB hard disk and three-year warranty. However, its 3D performance is weak compared to similarly priced PCs, and we’d prefer a larger monitor. The Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire strikes a better balance of features and gaming performance.
