Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire review

Wired2Fire is best known for gaming PCs, so we had a pretty good idea of what to expect when we asked them to send us a complete Sandy Bridge-based computer system for £999 or less. The dramatically-named Hellspawn XFire is well built, with a solid if not particularly flashy looking case. Its spacious and well-finished interior makes it easy to upgrade, too. There are four 5 1/4in drive bays and seven 3 1/2in bays. One of each is occupied, by a Blu-ray drive and 1TB hard disk respectively.

The Asus P8P67 motherboard is a popular match for the powerful Core i5-2500K processor, and with good reason. It’s great for upgraders, with four SATA II and four SATA III ports, of which only two are currently in use. Two of four memory slots are occupied by 2GB modules. You’ll have to unbolt the CPU cooler if you want to use the first slot, though.

Further down the board, there are two PCI-E x16 slots, two PCI-E x1 slots and three PCI slots. One of the PCI-E x16 slots is occupied by the graphics card, which also blocks one of the PCI-E x1 slots. There are two USB ports at the front and another eight at the back, two of which are USB3. There’s also a Firewire port and two PS/2 ports, but no eSATA. It’s not too hard to fit the eSATA backplate that comes in the motherboard box. If you ask Wired2Fire nicely, they’ll probably do it for you. Audio is provided by six 3.5mm stereo sockets, capable of 7.1 analogue surround sound, plus an optical S/PDIF output.

The graphics card is phenomenal – a 2GB ATI Radeon HD 6970, which produced a massive 58.7fps in STALKER and 74.3fps in Crysis. It’s an outstanding card that picked up an Ultimate award in our recent review, and can drive multiple monitors in Eyefinity mode if required. The Hellspawn’s phenomenal games performance is matched in Windows applications. The Core i5-2500K has been overclocked to 4.8GHz, making this one of most powerful PCs we’ve seen.

While most systems at this price come with a 24in monitor, Wired2Fire has gone one better with a 25in Hanns.G HH251 display. It only has VGA and DVI inputs but the DVI input support HDCP. The monitor also has built-in speakers, although they don’t hold a candle to dedicated PC speakers. The HH251 exhibits a slight blue tint that’s visible on white areas, but it’s barely noticeable in normal use and we welcomed the extra inch of screen size over competing systems’ screens.

Wired2Fire has made a saving when it comes to the mouse and keyboard, with a basic, wired Logitech Deluxe 250 set. They might not look as flashy as some wireless sets, but both are comfortable to use and you’ll never have to worry about running out of batteries. The PC has only a one-year warranty, but it’s collect-and-return rather than return-to-base.

We’ve seen a lot of phenomenal Sandy Bridge PCs, but this system is remarkable even by the very high standards of its competitors. With a massive monitor, immensely powerful graphics card and spectacular performance in our tests, the Hellspawn is our Best Buy.