Wired2Fire Diablo Reactor review

The Wired2Fire Diablo Reactor one of the best looking budget PCs we’ve seen in a while. Its case is well built, with a well finished interior and particularly secure-feeling tool-less drive mounts in the seven 3.5in bays and four 5.25in bays. Two of the 3.5in bays are externally facing, too, so you can easily add hotplug disk caddies and memory card readers. There’s even enough room for extra-long graphics cards such as the AMD Radeon HD 6950, but you’ll have to move the hard disk out of the way first.

Of course, it’s what’s inside that really counts, and it’s not surprise to see is an overclocked Intel Core i5-3570K processor. In this case, the CPU has been overclocked from its default 3.4GHz to a whopping 4.6GHz. It’s no surprise that the Diablo Reactor did extremely well in our benchmarks, with an overall score of 127. That means it’s more than powerful enough to cope with any desktop application.

Gaming is almost as acoomplished. The VTX AMD Radeon HD 7770 has 1GB of RAM and performed fairly well in our gaming benchmarks. We saw a frame rate of 48.1fps in Dirt Showdown at Ultra quality at a resolution of 1,920×1,080. Crysis 2 running at Ultra quality settings at the same Full HD resolution, only achieved 23fps. We had to drop detail settings to Very High quality to get a playable average frame rate of 41.3fps. However, this still shows that you can play the latest games at high detail settings. The graphics card has two DVI outputs as well as HDMI and DisplayPort connections.

The popular Asus P8Z77-V LX2 motherboard has four memory slots, of which two are occupied by 1,600MHz modules of 4GB Corsair XMS RAM. The leftmost slot is a bit of a tight fit alongside the CPU cooler, but is fortunately already occupied, so you can easily upgrade by just popping another module into one of the unused slots. That said, 8GB is plenty for almost all users, unless you’re into memory-intensive tasks such as virtualisation or multi-track audio recording.

There are two PCI slots, two PCI-E x1 slots and two PCI-E x16 slots. However, one of the x16 slots actually runs at x4, while the other is home to the PC’s graphics card. The graphics card also blocks access to one of the x1 slots. However, that still leaves a fair bit of upgrade potential. The system is equipped with a 1TB hard disk and a DVD-RW drive, connected to a SATA3 and a SATA2 port respectively. This leaves one SATA3 and three SATA2 ports available for further storage upgrades, such as adding an SSD boot drive.

The computer two USB ports at the front panel, in addition to 3.5mm headphone and mic ports. At the back, you’ll find three 3.5mm analogue audio outputs for 5.1 surround sound, a PS/2 port, Gigabit Ethernet and six USB ports. Two of these are USB3. There’s also an unused USB3 header at mid-board which can easily be connected to a backplane for extra high-speed ports.

The 23.6in Full HD AOC e2450Swh monitor stands out when comparing the system to many similarly priced PCs. We measured a respectable contrast ratio of 802:1, meaning that there’s plenty of subtle shading visible in dark images, but its sRGB colour gamut at default settings is a rather poor 79 per cent and the screen slightly overemphasises green tones, although not to the point of having a marked colour cast on white test screens. However, it’s nice and big, and we appreciated the presence of an HDMI input as well as the usual VGI and DVI ports.

The keyboard and mouse are a very generic Octigen set. They’re nothing special, but the keyboard’s standard layout lends itself easily to touch-typing, despite the slightly dull and unresponsive feel of the keys. The ambidextrous mouse is also comfortable to use, if rather light-weight.

This is a good system with a powerful processor, reasonable graphics card and a nice big monitor. However, the Chillblast Fusion Sprite is a better all-rounder, with a more powerful graphics card and much better quality display.