Palicomp Alpha Samurai review

If you want to add internal storage, there’s space to do so in the form of three free 31/2in bays, one externally facing, and two unused 51/4in bays. The case is light, but not particularly flimsy. Although it’s easy to move around, there’s little dust- or sound-proofing, which makes this PC a little bit noisier than most. There’s a particularly loud front intake fan mounted between the disk cage and the front panel, too.

The front panel has the usual audio I/O, along with two USB ports. At the back are six USB ports, including two USB3 ports. It also has PS/2 ports, optical S/PDIF output, three 3.5mm stereo ports for analogue surround sound and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

The keyboard and mouse are a budget wireless set from Logitech. They’re reasonably comfortable and accurate to use. Palicomp’s chosen a great monitor, too. The Asus VS247H is a 23.6in matt widescreen display with HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs.

The Blu-ray drive and 16GB of memory are particularly welcome features, but we’d prefer a more powerful graphics card. We feel that the Chillblast Fusion Vantage strikes a better balance between features and frame rates.