Vibox Tempest review

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.