Vibox Tempest review

The Vibox Tempest is a gaming PC with an overclocked six-core 4.4GHz AMD FX-6350 processor, a massive 16GB of memory, a 120GB solid-state drive and a 1TB hard disk. Crucially, the Tempest is armed with a great graphics card in the form of a 2GB AMD Radeon R9 270X.

The stylised front panel of the Vibox Tempest won’t suit all tastes, but it’s attractive in its own way. The system is relatively compact, but although the inside of the Tempest looks small, there’s enough space to fit fairly large graphics cards.

The AMD Radeon R9 270X uses the same Pitcairn graphics processor as the older Radeon HD 7870. The Radeon R9 270X performed a little better than its predecessor in our tests, though. The Tempest produced an average frame rate of 78.2fps in Dirt Showdown and a jerky 19.5fps in our Crysis 3 benchmark at Very High quality. The Tempest’s Crysis 3 performance was much better with graphics quality set to High, and it produced an average frame rate of 37fps. Even with graphics quality set to High, Crysis 3 looks fantastic. The AMD Radeon R9 270X has two DVI ports, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort output so you should have no problem connecting it to your monitor.

The Tempest produced 90 overall in our benchmark results, which is a good score and only 10 points off the score of our reference Intel Core i5-3570K processor. Even better, the Tempest scored 101 in the multitasking portion of our benchmark suite, which is no doubt due to the processor’s six cores. These scores mean that the Tempest has plenty of power whether you’re gaming or using desktop applications.

The Tempest’s processor is housed in a Gigabyte 990XA-UD3 motherboard. The board has a good range of expansion slots, including two PCI slots, two PCI-E x1 slots and three PCI-E x16 slots. It’s worth noting that only the top PCI-E x16 slot actually runs at x16. If the second slot is populated, both it and the top slot will run at x8, while the third slot only runs at x4. One of the PCI-E x1 slots is blocked by the graphics card, but there’s a free PCI-E x1 slot above it. One of the PCI slots is occupied by an 802.11n Wi-Fi adaptor, which is handy if you don’t necessarily want to use a wired Ethernet connection or tie up a USB port with a dongle.

The motherboard has a Gigabit Ethernet port on the back panel, as well as 3.5mm ports for up to 7.1 analogue surround sound, an optical S/PDIF output, a PS/2 mouse/keyboard port and, unusually, a FireWire port. There are 10 USB ports on the back panel, providing plenty of connectivity, but only two of these are USB3 ports. Sadly, you lose one of the USB3 ports to a pass-through cable that hooks up the front panel USB3 port. Even though there’s an unused USB3 header at mid-board, the case’s front panel connectors aren’t equipped to use it. There are also two standard USB ports on the Tempest’s front panel, as well as an SDXC and MMC card reader and audio ports.

A porthole-shaped display gives you at-a-glance information about the PC’s temperature, uptime and fan speed. The front panel swings open to give you access to the front accessible drive bays, which include four 5 ¼in bays and two 3 1/2in bays. There are a further four internal 3 1/2in bays in their own fixed drive cage at the bottom of the chassis. In this drive cage you’ll find a 120GB SSD that’s home to your Windows installation, and a 1TB HDD for data storage. The motherboard has six SATA3 ports, only two of which are in use, so there’s plenty of room to add more internal storage if it’s needed.

The Vibox Tempest is a good gaming PC and it’s refreshing to see a very capable AMD processor being used in a system of this kind. Although it didn’t do as well in our application benchmarks, its gaming performance is better than that of the similarly priced Braebo Selene, or the £809 configuration of the Palicomp Sniper Elite2 Gamer. The Vibox Tempest is a powerful and effective gaming system.