Palicomp Alpha Inferno review

Modern processors and graphics cards are incredibly powerful. As a result, today’s gaming PCs are more powerful and better value than they’ve ever been. If you buy a high-end PC today, expect to be gaming on it in three or even five years’ time.

The Palicomp Alpha Inferno is a fantastically well-specified machine, with an Intel Core i5-3570K processor that’s been overclocked to 4.7GHz, an overclocked XFX AMD Radeon HD 7950 with 3GB of memory and 16GB of super-fast 2,133MHz Patriot memory occupying all four memory slots. It’s the vast amount of RAM that really sets this computer apart from the wealth of Core i5-3570K-based gaming systems that have been on sale recently. On the face of it, you really aren’t going to need that much for gaming, although it’s useful if you enjoy audio or video production, or need to run virtual machines. It’s also a good way of future-proofing a system. Over the last couple of years, the amount of memory we expect to see in a PC has crept up from 4GB to 8GB; The Alpha Inferno’s 16GB should support your future computing needs as software becomes more complex.

The Alpha Inferno’s motherboard is an Asus P8Z77-V LX, which is probably the board we see more frequently than any other in OEM PCs. There’s a good reason for this: it’s relatively inexpensive and has a good range of features. The motherboard has two PCI-E x16 slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, although one PCI-E x1 slot is blocked by the graphics card, and three PCI slots. That’s gives you plenty of scope to install all the extra sound cards, TV tuners and other expansion cards you might need.

If storage is of greater interest to you, there’s an unused onboard USB3 header, so you can add up to two more extra fast USB ports on either a backplane or front panel adaptor. This is in addition to three USB2 headers and the existing external ports. If internal storage is of greater interest to you, there are three vacant SATA2 ports. Both the motherboard’s SATA3 ports are hooked up to hard disks and a SATA2 port is in use for the Blu-ray drive. You get plenty of storage in this system, with a 120GB SSD system drive providing enough space for the operating system and a few programs, and a 2TB HDD for all your data and other software.

While most cases have some 5 1/4in and some 3 1/2in bays, the Alpha Inferno’s case simply has a full-height bank of 5 1/4in bays, with optional mounting shelves to attach 3 1/2in or 2 1/2in drives. There’s lots of space for long graphics cards and the inner edges are all nicely finished, but the case does little to insulate system sound, has plenty of wide holes to allow dust and fluff inside and looks ugly. Fortunately, the system isn’t overly noisy.

The front panel has a couple of USB ports and the usual 3.5mm stereo microphone and headphone ports. At the back are three 3.5mm stereo outputs for analogue surround sound and an optical S/PDIF output for digital audio. There’s a Gigabit Ethernet port, PS/2 port, four USB2 ports and two USB3 ports. The impressive graphics card below the motherboard’s main backplane has a DVI port, HDMI output and a couple of mini DisplayPort outputs.

The Alpha Inferno put in a strong performance in all of our tests, acheive frame rates of 89.5fps in Dirt 3 and 41.2fps in Crysis 2. It has plenty of processor power, too, achieving an overall score of 134 in our benchmark tests.

This is an unquestionably powerful PC, which compares well to similarly priced systems. There’s an argument to be made for having a better motherboard with more SATA3 or USB3 ports, or a prettier case instead of the extra 8GB of memory, but it’s well built and everything’s fit for purpose, earning the Alpha Inferno a full five stars.