Palicomp Sniper Elite2 Gamer review

This PC was provided to us as a base PC system with a variety of internal and external upgrade options, contact the manufacturer to get the exact specification you require

The Palicomp Sniper Elite2 Gamer has a base price of £570. This gets you a surprisingly powerful system, with an Intel Core i5-4670K processor overclocked to 4.2GHz and an Asus Z87-K motherboard. The core specification also includes 8GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory and a generous 2TB hard disk.

An extra £90 will get you a 128GB SSD, producing faster boot speeds and a more responsive desktop experience. The overclocked Haswell processor put in a great performance in our benchmark tests, managing an overall score of 130. The Asus Z87-K motherboard has three PCI slots, two PCI-E x1 slots and two PCI-E x16 slots. As you’d expect, one of the PCI-E x1 slots is inevitably blocked by either of the graphics card options. The motherboard also has six SATA3 ports and two unused memory slots, while the back panel has four USB and two USB3 ports, two PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm stereo outputs for 5.1 analogue surround sound.

Meanwhile, you’ll find a USB and a USB3 port at the front of the case, alongside 3.5mm mic and headphone ports. The case is well finished and, although not particularly sound- or dust-proof, it’s reasonably sturdy and the system isn’t too loud overall. There are three 5 1/4in drive bays, one occupied by the DVD-RW drive, and seven 3 1/2in bays. Depending on which upgrades you buy, either one or two of the latter bays will be in use, and one of the 3 1/2in bays is externally facing so you can use it to fit a memory card reader.

The Sniper Elite2 Gamer’s basic specification also includes a 1GB AMD Radeon HD 7770 graphics card. The HD 7770 will give you a frame rate of 48.1fps in Dirt Showdown at Ultra quality at a resolution of 1,920×1,080. When running Crysis 2 at Ultra quality settings at the same resolution, we only saw 23fps, but you can drop quality settings to Very High quality to get a playable average frame rate of 41.3fps.

Palicomp also offers an upgrade to an Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 graphics card for £80, but we don’t really see the point as it only added a very small boost to each of our graphics benchmarks.

You can buy an Asus VS247H LCD monitor with the system for £160. This is a middling 23.6in display with HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs. In our tests it proved to have a poor contrast ratio of 204:1, but our colour gamut coverage tests showed it could display 90.2% of sRGB, which is reasonable. These results were born out by our subjective tests, as colours were accurate without any unwanted casts or tints, but dark images in particular were murky and lacking in detail. If you buy separately you can get significantly better 24in displays for a similar price, such as the Budget Buy-winning AOC E2462vwh.

The PC comes with a basic Cherry mouse and keyboard set. Although a little drab, both are fairly comfortable and accurate to use. The mouse is lighter and the keyboard’s action a bit spongier than we’d like, but they work well. The PC also has a branded 550W ThermalTake power supply and you can choose to have either Windows 8 or Windows 7 installed.

If you give the monitor a miss and opt for the graphics card and SSD upgrades, the PC will cost you £740. This is a great price for this outstanding PC and earns it a Best Buy award – just buy your screen elsewhere.