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If we were handing out prizes for weight, Palicomp’s Phoenix i5 Nitro would win hands down. With thick metal sides and rubber feet that look like caterpillar tracks, it’s a veritable tank of a PC, complete with excellent insulation to keep noise in and dust out.
Its Asus P8P67 Pro motherboard houses an overclocked Intel Core i5-K2500. With its multiplier set to 47, the processor’s speed has been ramped up from its usual 3.3GHz to a blistering 4.7GHz. 8GB of 1,600MHz memory in the form of two 4GB modules occupies two of the motherboard’s RAM slots – adding even more is easy, as the CPU cooler doesn’t block any of the slots.
The computer achieved an overall score of 137 in our tests – not the fastest we’ve seen from an overclocked i5-2500K, but not far off. Its performance in our gaming frame rate tests was impressive, too. The 2GB ATI Radeon HD 6950 achieved 66.9fps in Crysis and 51.8fps in STALKER. That means it’s powerful enough to keep up with the most intensive games for at least a couple of years. It also supports ATI Eyefinity to drive up to four monitors.
A metal strut helps to hold the graphics card in place, but it’s easy to unbolt it to gain access to the motherboard. The P8P67 Pro has three PCI-E x16 slots, one of which is occupied by the graphics card, two PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, of which only one is accessible. There are four SATA II and four SATA III ports, but all the SATA II ports are currently in use, servicing the hard disk, optical disk and external SATA ports. The case has enough room for seven internal 3½in drives and four externally-facing 5¼in drives. We like the 3½in drive cages, which let you screw your hard disk into a drawer-like caddy that simply slides into place. One is occupied by a 1.5TB hard disk and there’s a Blu-ray reader, DVD writer drive in one of the 5¼in bays.
At the top of the PC are two USB ports, an eSATA port and a panel that slides away to reveal standard internal SATA data and power connectors, ready to slot in an internal hard disk. The motherboard’s back panel is home to eight USB ports – two of them USB3 – along with two eSATA III ports, a Firewire port and a pair of PS/2 ports. Audio sockets comprise six 3.5mm analogue stereo ports and both optical and co-axial S/PDIF outputs. An additional backplate provides another two USB3 ports.
The PC comes with a 24in Samsung B2430 monitor, which is nicely designed and does the job, although we noticed uneven backlighting that produced a bright white line along the bottom bezel when we viewed dark scenes. The keyboard and mouse are a generic wireless set from Labtek. They feel a bit cheap but are still comfortable. A compact set of Logitech S220 2.1 speakers is similarly inexpensive, but produces a pleasingly well-rounded sound. The warranty is a basic one-year affair.
The Phoenix i5 Nitro is powerful, well built and comes with a large display. However, the Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire comes with an even bigger monitor and better graphics card.
