Wired2Fire Diablo Elite review

The huge Wired2Fire Diablo Elite and the tiny Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury demonstrate how wildly different nearly identically-priced gaming PCs can be.

The Diablo Elite comes in a large and fairly plain Fractal Define S case. It’s an ATX chassis with an unconventional design that means it can be slightly difficult to work with when you’re looking to upgrade your components. The case is designed with efficient cooling in mind, with a rather industrial-looking top panel with a huge grille on top. The front panel design means there’s no room for an optical drive or any other external 5.25in drive bays, so you’ll need to buy a USB optical drive if you’re dependent on optical discs. The intake vents on the front-left and -right of the case are used by a single 140mm intake fan while there’s a second 140mm fan at the rear of the case. With just the graphics card between the front and rear of the case, there’s little to obstruct airflow from front to rear.

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The top panel mounting point is occupied by a Fractal Design Kelvin S36 closed-loop water cooler. It’s generally quiet, although it does sometimes kick in unnecessarily when you’re undertaking relatively light tasks such as copying files and opening simple applications. This is normally only a brief increase in noise in these situations, but it’s noticeable because the top panel isn’t insulated.

The water-cooling system is present to keep the overclocked Intel Core i7-6700K at a reasonable operating temperature. This quad-core ‘Skylake’-generation chip normally runs at a maximum Turbo Boost clock speed of 4.2GHz, but Wired2Fire has used the processor’s unlocked multipliers to increase this to 4.7GHz. As you may already have guessed, it’s a bit of a monster. Paired with 16GB of 2,400MHz DDR4 memory, the PC powered its way to an incredible score of 182 in our 4K benchmarks, the highest score we’ve ever recorded in these strenuous tests.

The score breaks down to 158 in the image-editing test, 176 for video-encoding and 195 for the multitasking test. There’s nothing this PC can’t handle, and that’s before we get to its graphics capabilities. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti sits between the absurd GeForce Titan X and the more wallet-friendly GTX 980. It has 6GB of GDDR5 graphics memory with a maximum throughput of 336GB/s, which is seriously fast. The card alone costs around £590, so makes up more than a third of the Diablo Ultra’s overall price. There’s no doubting the card’s power, but it will be overkill unless you have at least a 2,560×1,440, or preferably higher, resolution monitor.

At 1,920×1,080, the GeForce 980 Ti is far more powerful than even today’s most graphically intensive games require at maximum settings. At this resolution the PC completed our Dirt Showdown and Metro: Last Light benchmarks with scores of 160fps and 63fps respectively. The card is only challenged when you crank things up to 3,840×2,160. At this resolution we saw 70fps in Dirt Showdown and 38fps in Metro: Last Light (once we’d disabled super-sampled anti-aliasing) which is hugely impressive.

To help the case’s airflow-friendly design, storage drives are shunted into the very tight space behind the motherboard and are only accessible via the right-side panel. There’s room for three 3.5in or 2.5in drives and space for a further two 2.5in drives behind the motherboard. Wired2Fire has installed a 500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD. 500GB of space on a fast solid-state system drive is very welcome and leaves you plenty of room for your games and programs. A 2TB Seagate hard disk is also included. If you want more storage, there are enough SATA3 connectors for four more drives and an M.2 socket to bolt a fast and tiny SSD directly to the motherboard.

The PC’s Asus Z170 Pro Gaming motherboard has plenty of other room for expansion: you can install another graphics card, for example, as both Nvidia SLI and AMD CrossFireX are supported, and still have another PCI-E x16 slot free (running at x4 speed). There are also three further PCI-E x1 connectors for smaller peripherals such as Wi-Fi adapters.

At the rear of the board are two USB3.1 ports, one of which is a Type-C reversible connector. In addition, there are four USB3 connectors at the rear and two more at the front of the case. There are also two USB2 connectors at the rear along with five 3.5mm audio jacks and an optical S/PDF port. The graphics card, meanwhile, has a DVI connector, three DisplayPort connectors and an HDMI port.

The Wired2Fire Diablo Elite is a very large but powerful PC. It may not have the outright charm of the compact Chillblast Fusion Nano Fury but in terms of raw power it’s unmatched by any other PC we’ve tested. If you have a monitor capable of stretching its graphics card, the PC is a fantastic choice.