Braebo Selene review

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.