Palicomp Intel Haswell i5 Commander review

For storage, the Commander has a combination of a 60GB SSD system disk and a 1TB hard disk. Although the SSD is too small to house more than a handful of the latest 3D games, it does at least make Windows 8.1 feel very responsive and provides fast boot- and wake-up times.

There are three vacant SATA ports, so you can potentially add more storage at a later date, but there are no 2 1/2in bays available in the case. If you buy another SSD and it has a 3.5in adaptor you could use one of the three spare internal 3.5in bays. The PC also has an unused external 5 1/4in bay and another 5.25in bay that’s occupied by a DVD-RW drive.

The case is equipped with a 120mm front fan, a 120mm rear exhaust, two top exhaust fans and a relatively quiet Thermaltake CPU cooler, but the noisiest things in it are the graphics card’s fans. The case’s side panels aren’t designed for silent computing, but they block all but a low hum, despite the presence of air vents at the top, rear and front of the case. We were pleased to note that all of these have tight mesh grilles to keep dust out. At the top of the case, alongside the power switches, are a USB3 port and two standard USB ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks.

The Palicomp i5 Commander is a great PC if you want to buy something that can play the latest games at the highest, or very nearly the highest, quality. Palicomp has assembled a great selection of components, and we particularly like the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card. We’re not keen on low-capacity SSDs, that’s not enough to keep the Palicomp Intel Haswell i5 Commander from winning our Best Buy award. It combines great value with great gaming performance.