Palicomp Alpha Attitude review

The Palicomp Alpha Attitude is a performance PC with plenty of gaming power, along with the kind of high-quality components we expect to see at this price. The beautifully engineered but very brash Aero Cool Strike-X G7 case immediately catches the eye, but it’s not the only stand-out feature in a system with a whopping 16GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5-3570K processor that’s been overclocked to 4.4GHz. Its performance in our application benchmarks was as good as we’ve come to expect, providing an overall score of 121.

The case is either ugly or striking depending on your tastes, but we loved its tool-free multi-purpose drive bays that can be easily fitted with 5 1/4in drives or shelves to support 3 1/2in or 2 1/2in hard disks. We also appreciated the well-fitting side panels, which are easy to slide on and off. They even have plastic handles on the back so you don’t have to grip them with your fingertips. The case has mesh ventilation panels on all except one side, which means that it’s not particularly dust- or sound-proof. Even so, we didn’t find the PC’s low hum too obtrusive. Although the inside of the case is a little cluttered, with cables running from the 750W power supply at the bottom, there’s plenty of airflow and room for upgrades. The hefty Thermaltake heat sink looked a little askew, but was mounted solidly.

The motherboard is an Asus P8Z77-V LX2. It’s not our favourite version of this almost-ubiquitous range of motherboards, but it has all the critical features you need, with two PCI slots, two PCI-E x16 slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, although one of these is blocked by the graphics card in the x16 slot above. There are also six SATA ports, of which two are SATA3 and the rest SATA2, along with four memory slots, each filled with a 4GB module of 1,866MHz Patriot RAM. The PC has a Blu-ray re-writer, as well as a 128GB SSD system disk and 2TB hard disk. Thanks to its high memory capacity and solid state drive it’s no surprise that the Alpha Attitude feels incredibly fast and responsive when running desktop applications.

{B]SMOOTH PLAYER

The graphics card is an overclocked Palit Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti. It shone in our 3D gaming tests, producing a frame rate of 55.5fps in Dirt Showdown at Ultra quality and 41.6fps in Crysis 2, again at Ultra quality. It has two DVI, one HDMI and one DisplayPort output on the back, and can to run up to four monitors.

Also at the back of the case are six USB ports, two of which are USB3, PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm analogue audio outputs for 5.1 surround sound. There are four USB ports at the top of the case, one of which is USB3, along with 3.5mm ports for microphones and headphones.

The monitor is a matt 23.6in Asus VS247H with VGA, DVI and HDMI inputs. Conveniently, the Alpha Attitude also comes with a HDMI cable. Sadly, we noticed a little bit of light bleed at the edges of the screen in our solid black test, and contrast was poor. Our tests also showed that the monitor can show 89.6 per cent of the SRGB colour gamut, which is rather poor and indicates that not all colours may be reproduced with ideal accuracy.

A Logitech MK260 wireless set provides the keyboard and mouse. The keyboard’s a little spongy and the mouse is a tad small, but both are reasonably comfortable to use and the keyboard proved accurate for touch-typing.

The Alpha Attitude stands up well to other performance PCs in the same price bracket, but its internal layout felt a little cluttered despite the excellent case, and although the Asus VS247H is good-sized monitor, we’d have preferred a better quality display. We’d also have liked a slightly more capable motherboard at this price. Despite these reservations, the Alpha Attitude is still an excellent performance PC. It’s just not quite as good value as the company’s own Palicomp Alpha Inferno.