Palicomp Core i3 Blast 540OC-22 review

The choice of Cooler Master's Scout chassis lends a certain gaming appeal to this Palicomp system, since it's designed to be lugged to LAN parties - hence the handle. It's dark and stylish, and boasts excellent build quality and broad selection of ports and sockets.

The front of the case has four USB ports and an eSATA connection, with a further ten USB ports on the rear. It's just as impressive on the inside. The modular PSU is a rare but welcome sight, which should aid future expansion, and Palicomp has ensured cables are carefully tidied and hidden behind the motherboard tray.

Despite the slightly cramped interior it's easy to add components, and with one PCI Express x16 socket, a pair of DIMM sockets and a selection of drive bays vacant, there's plenty of room for growth. Other neat touches include a side-facing hard disk tower and tool-less drive bays throughout. The one issue we did have was with the Akasa AK-968 CPU cooler: although perfectly docile at its stock speed of 1,900rpm, it became disruptively noisy at 2,600rpm under load.

Gamers will be pleased with the Palicomp's performance. It boasts a Radeon HD 5770 from XFX, which returned impressive scores of 44fps in our High quality Crysis test, and a creditable 26fps in our Very High quality benchmark. Both scores are high for such a mid-range system.

Where Palicomp compromises a little is in its choice of processor, opting for a low-end Core i3-540 - but with an overclock from the stock 3.06GHz to 3.5GHz. This makes it far more powerful than it first looks, and a score of 2.1 in our application benchmarks is more than enough power for most. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that we've seen plenty of PCs push Core i3 processors even higher, scoring as high as 2.38 in one case.

The Palicomp's peripherals are a mixed bag. The 22in BenQ monitor offers a native resolution of 1,920 x 1,080, but sports fairly average image quality thanks to an overly intrusive backlight. The proprietary keyboard and mouse aren't that comfortable when compared to the usual suspects from Logitech and Microsoft. The key action feels harsh and unforgiving rather than soft and comfortable, and there are no extra media features or shortcut buttons.

The inclusion of speakers is more impressive, even if they're only Logitech's budget S220 2.1 set; sound quality is surprisingly good, and most packages at this price don't bother with any audio equipment.

It isn't a bad PC, then, and if you can live with a noisy cooler and a ragbag of peripherals, there's much to like at this attractive price. It isn't the best we've seen - Wired2Fire's Hellspawn Ultima retains the crown - but it's certainly worth considering.

Author: Mike Jennings