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CCL’s budget PC is named after the case in which it’s housed. It’s a bright red, brushed aluminium Lian-Li mini PC case, and it’s good-looking and well-built. Despite its tiny size, it has an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU, a generous 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard disk. It’s bundled with a stylish 22in LED-backlit Acer monitor.
When you open the Little Devil’s case, you can hardly see the motherboard as it’s obscured by the power supply. There are only two memory slots, but most people won’t need to upgrade. There aren’t any free drive bays, but there’s a single PCI-E x16 slot and some room available for a graphics card. You’ll have to be very careful which card you buy, however: most modern cards are far too long to fit, and the position of the hard disk means it’d have to be quite a thin card too, so double-width cards are out of the question, and cards with large fans may prove troublesome.
For this reason, gamers won’t find the Little Devil at all tempting, but if you just want to watch the odd movie, the Core i5’s integrated Intel HD graphics chip is capable of decoding HD content. You can output both audio and video via one of the HDMI ports, and you also have a choice of VGA for analogue video, a full set of 7.1 analogue audio outputs as well as both optical and coaxial S/PDIF ports.
Further expansion is provided by two USB ports on the front panel and six on the rear, two of which support the faster USB3 standard. Unfortunately the budget Cherry keyboard and mouse set take up two ports. You could instead opt for a wireless set that use just one USB receiver, but the supplied set are reasonable. We found the keyboard a bit spongy and the mouse too light.
The 22in Acer S221HQLbd monitor has a bright LED backlight, but there was a dark patch on the left side of our screen. A slight blue cast that makes flesh tones a bit cold, but otherwise colours are strong and contrast is fairly good. We had to run the monitor’s Auto-Config a couple of times to get a sharp enough picture over VGA: no digital cables are provided.
The Intel Core i5-2400 chip isn’t quite as fast as the 2500K used in our reference PC, but a score of 94 overall in our benchmark is respectable, and with 8GB of RAM it shouldn’t have any problems editing HD video. The integrated graphics aren’t as impressive, so playing the latest 3D games is out of the question.
The Little Devil is aimed at those who don’t fancy opening up the case to upgrade with more drives or PCI cards, and its 1TB hard disk means you’ll have little reason to. Unless you really want the option to add a better graphics card in the future, this PC is ideal for situations where it’s on show, as its smart case is far more attractive than the large black cases we’re used to seeing.
However, you can get more for your money elsewhere. The Dino PC Jurassic 2500 comes with a larger, better monitor, a faster CPU and a Blu-ray drive, for example.
