Palicomp Phoenix i5 Nitro review

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.