Palicomp Intel Haswell i5 Commander review

The Palicomp Intel Haswell i5 Commander is a well-made gaming PC built within a Zalman Z3 Plus case with a fairly neat internal layout. There are a lot of cables packed in behind the right-hand case panel, as the 550W Thermaltake PSU doesn’t have detachable leads, but business side of the chassis is clearly laid out.

The PC has a quad-core Intel Core i5-4670K processor overclocked to 4GHz. It managed a healthy score of 123 overall in our application benchmarks and is more than powerful enough for anything you’ll need to run in the foreseeable future. The Asus Z87-K motherboard is one of our favourites, and it has a healthy range of expansion slots. The main PCI-E x16 slot is occupied by a graphics card, which also blocks the PCI-E x1 slot beneath it, but that still leaves you three PCI slots, one PCI-E x1 slot and a second PCI-E x16 slot, which actually runs at x4. Two 4GB memory modules occupy one pair of RAM slots, leaving two free for future upgrades.

The motherboard has a good selection of rear ports, including two USB3 ports, four standard USB ports, a pair of PS/2 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm audio ports that can output up to 5.1 surround sound.

The graphics card, meanwhile, has two DVI outputs, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort output. The graphics card is the powerhouse that dictates the gaming performance of a PC, so we’re pleased to see the i5 Commander has an overclocked 2GB AMD Radeon R9 270X inside it. Even though the R9 270X is by no means a terribly expensive graphics card, its performance proved to be nothing short of excellent.

We expect any decent graphics card to wipe the floor with Dirt Showdown at Ultra quality and a 1,920×1,080 resolution these days, and the R9 270X did so with an average frame rate of 87.9fps. What most impressed us, though, was the R9 270X’s performance in Crysis 3. With High quality graphics 4x anti-aliasing and a resolution of 1,920×1,080, the PC produced an excellent average frame rate of 40.7fps. Even with graphics quality set to Very High, the highest setting possible, the PC still produced a playable average frame rate of 30.9fps. The AMD Radeon R9 270X is an excellent choice for a mid-range gaming PC such as this.

For storage, the Commander has a combination of a 60GB SSD system disk and a 1TB hard disk. Although the SSD is too small to house more than a handful of the latest 3D games, it does at least make Windows 8.1 feel very responsive and provides fast boot- and wake-up times.

There are three vacant SATA ports, so you can potentially add more storage at a later date, but there are no 2 1/2in bays available in the case. If you buy another SSD and it has a 3.5in adaptor you could use one of the three spare internal 3.5in bays. The PC also has an unused external 5 1/4in bay and another 5.25in bay that’s occupied by a DVD-RW drive.

The case is equipped with a 120mm front fan, a 120mm rear exhaust, two top exhaust fans and a relatively quiet Thermaltake CPU cooler, but the noisiest things in it are the graphics card’s fans. The case’s side panels aren’t designed for silent computing, but they block all but a low hum, despite the presence of air vents at the top, rear and front of the case. We were pleased to note that all of these have tight mesh grilles to keep dust out. At the top of the case, alongside the power switches, are a USB3 port and two standard USB ports as well as microphone and headphone jacks.

The Palicomp i5 Commander is a great PC if you want to buy something that can play the latest games at the highest, or very nearly the highest, quality. Palicomp has assembled a great selection of components, and we particularly like the AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics card. We’re not keen on low-capacity SSDs, that’s not enough to keep the Palicomp Intel Haswell i5 Commander from winning our Best Buy award. It combines great value with great gaming performance.