Palicomp Phoenix Hydro-X review

Does it have the new chips?

Sounds fab. How do we tell if it has the new chips from Intel? Or is it pot luck!

By DJ2003 on 25 Feb 2011

RE: new chips

DJ2003 - thanks for raising that good point. Palicomp won't be selling any of these systems with older, affected Sandy Bridge kit, but you might have to wait a couple of weeks for the new motherboards and processors to appear.

Cheers,

Mike

By Mikey_Jennings on 25 Feb 2011

How noisy is it. To the point of annoying and wondering whether there is something wrong with your pc or a hum that you notice but can block out?

By TimoGunt on 25 Feb 2011

NEW SANDYBRIDGE MOTHERBOARDS

Hi All! This PC really is our top spec at the moment and good to see we are beating our own previous record in games and performance. We have the new chipset motherboards landing with us early next week on both ASUS and GIGABYTE, so we are currently taking orders for this spec and any on our site and will be building them next week. We are not selling any PCs on our site at the moment with the affected intel recall chipsets. All PCs will come with the new chipset. For the full range of sandybridge PCs please see our phoenix range http://www.palicomp.co.uk/index.php?searchStr=phoe
nix&_a=viewCat&sort_by=price&sort_order=low

By Palicomp on 25 Feb 2011

SOUND LEVELS

@ TimoGunt
This is the quietest top end spec we sell, with the many large case fans inside and the water cooling on the cpu its as quiet as we can make it. The larger fans dont have to spin as fast to move as much airflow as smaller fans so they run quieter. The graphics cards fans will spin when they are put under load i.e. playing games at high framerates etc, but you'd obviously be playing a game with sound one in which case you wouldnt notice it. Also temp on the graphics cards is about 20 degrees lower than the older Kinetic Hydro-X model which had 2 x ATI 6870's in. The 2 x ATI 6950's in this spec run at a much faster speed, they have 2GB RAM on each card as apposed to 1GB on the other spec and they are cooled more efficiently.

By Palicomp on 25 Feb 2011

Sound issues

TimoGunt, thanks for the message and sorry that there wasn't further information in the review itself.

It's not the loudest system we've had and I certainly wouldn't call it annoying: when idling it was a quiet hum that won't be off-putting, but the graphics cards do spin up when gaming. They're quite loud, but speakers or headphones will certainly mask it.

That said, if low noise is a priority this isn't the machine to buy.

On the issue of temperature, I found that the graphics cards in this system peaked at around 79 degrees when stress-tested at full load - about ten degrees less than the previous Kinetic Hydro-X.

Hopefully that answers some questions, please don't hesitate if you have more!

Cheers,

Mike

By Mikey_Jennings on 25 Feb 2011

Is it possible to alter the spec slightly? Upgrading the slave HDD to 2TB and the primary SSD to 120GB. Also is it possible to change the memory configuration to 2x 4GB sticks so that all four banks are not used?

Thanks.

By evostu on 17 Mar 2011

Upgrade Hydro-X

@ Evostu,

While this PC is already extremely powerful in every way, yes you can upgrade it further. For any parts that are not on the upgrades section on our site, please call Palicomp Sales on 01270 898104 or e-mail us on sales@palicomp.co.uk and we can e-mail you over a quote and ref number for the order.

By Palicomp on 22 Mar 2011