Wired2Fire Diablo Predator review

The manufacturer has made some tweaks to Windows 8, seemingly to alleviate some common criticisms levelled at the operating system. Instead of the tiled Start screen, it goes straight to the Desktop view, which will be more familiar to Windows 7 users. There’s also a shutdown button on the taskbar, which is useful because Windows 8’s is ridiculously well hidden, and a small shortcut bar that provides easy access to your document folders, hard disks, network and control panel, as well as some installed programs. It even works like Windows 7’s Start menu in that you can right-click Computer to bring up the Management interface, for example. It isn’t the prettiest operating system mod we’ve seen, but it certainly makes the transition to Windows 8 easier.

POWERFUL

The Diablo Predator is hugely powerful. Its Intel Core i5-3570K processor has been overclocked to an enormous 4.7GHz and it scored 150 overall in our benchmarks, which is one of the fastest scores we’ve seen. The PC’s graphics card is an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660, which is one of the company’s latest graphics cards. It’s an impressive mid-range card that can play some demanding games at close-to-maximum detail levels. In our challenging Crysis 2 Ultra detail test we saw an almost-smooth 27.2fps, so some minor detail tweaks will produce a consistently playable frame rate.

We couldn’t get our Dirt 3 benchmark to run under Windows 8, so we tried the more modern Dirt Showdown instead. At 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing and Ultra detail it proved a big challenge; 26.6fps is only just playable. However, knocking the detail down to High, where the game still looks amazing but doesn’t have quite such impressive lighting effects, gave a huge 111fps. If you don’t need to play your games at their absolute highest detail levels, you’ll be happy gaming on this PC.

CONCLUSION

Wired2Fire’s Diablo Predator is a solid Windows 8 PC. It’s powerful and smart, with an impressive IPS monitor, reasonable gaming power and some thoughtful operating system tweaks. We’d be tempted to find another £100 for the Palicomp Alpha Blade‘s terabyte of extra storage and sheer gaming power, but this is still a well-specified and good-value machine.