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The Braebo Selene is a well-equipped PC with a good graphics card and Haswell Core i5 processor that make it ideal for gaming. It also has 16GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM. That’s a high capacity by current standards, but with current games such as Battlefield 4 requiring 8GB of RAM to run smoothly on a 64-bit operating system it’s comforting to have extra RAM. 16GB of RAM is also plenty if you want to do image, music or video editing, making this PC all the more flexible.
The motherboard is an Asus Z87M-PLUS. This board doesn’t have a lot of expansion ports but its two PCI-E x1 slots and two PCI-E x16 slots should be more than enough for many users. However, it’s worth noting that the second x16 slot actually runs at x4, and one of the x1 slots is blocked by the graphics card. There are no PCI slots for legacy expansion cards, so you won’t be able to install any PCI cards from an old PC.
The Selene has a single 1TB hard disk installed and a DVD-RW drive. We would have preferred to see at least an SSD system drive and a separate mechanical drive for quicker boot ups and greater desktop responsiveness. As four of the motherboard’s six SATA 3 ports and six of the case’s seven drive bays are vacant you’ll have no problem installing an SSD yourself.
The Selene makes good use of the motherboard’s USB3 header to provide a front-panel USB3 port. There are also two USB connections the front panel as well as the 3.5mm mic and headphone ports. At the back are another four USB3 ports and two USB ports, as well as a PS/2 port for a mouse or keyboard. The motherboard also provides a Gigabit Ethernet port and an optical S/PDIF or six 3.5mm outputs for digital and analogue audio respectively.
The star of the show in this system is the Best Buy-winning AMD Radeon HD 7870 graphics card. The model used here is produced by Asus and has 2GB of RAM. It’s equipped with four outputs: two DVI, one DisplayPort and one HDMI. The Selene produced an average frame rate of 74.7fps in Dirt Showdown and 29.9fps in Crysis 2, and both tests were conducted at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 at Ultra quality. This shows that the card can comfortably handle many games at the highest settings, but you’ll have to reduce graphics quality settings and possibly the resolution to play more graphically challenging such as Crysis 3.
The Selene’s Intel Core i5-4670K processor is overclocked to 4.2GHz and produced a great overall score of 128 in our application benchmarks, so you shouldn’t have a problem running any popular application. The Core i5-4670K is cooled by Arctic Cooling’s Freezer 13 heat sink. It’s one of our favourite coolers and is very quiet. There’s an intake fan behind the front panel and plenty of room for air to circulate inside the case.
The Cooler Master K380 case is a plain, workmanlike affair, but it’s well finished inside and out and the top and bottom vents are covered with grilles to help keep dust and fluff out. There are additional fan mountings points at the rear of the PC and on the Perspex side panel.
A 500W Corsair PSU provides enough power for the current configuration, but if you plan on adding a more powerful graphics card or a great deal of extra storage, more power may be required in the future. Also bear in mind that the drive cage can’t be removed from this case to make room for full-length expansion cards.
This is a powerful and well-made PC that handles current games well. The Selene is a great PC, but we’d have liked an SSD included. A good alternative is the Best Buy-winning Palicomp Sniper Elite2 Gamer, which has an SSD and Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 graphics card in its £809 configuration.
