Palicomp AMD Kaveri Evolution review

We’re always impressed when PC makers push the boundaries of what we expect in any given price category. By including a 24in monitor in a £500 PC system, the Palicomp AMD Kaveri Evolution immediately grabbed our attention. It’s designed to be an all-round home PC, perfect for browsing the web and doing your email, but also up to occasionally editing images, encoding video or playing games.

The Iiyama ProLite E2483HS screen has a resolution of 1,920×1,080 and a matt finish that will cut down on unwanted reflections from overhead light sources. It doesn’t suffer noticeably from the low contrast and lack of colours vibrancy that can affect some matt screens, either.

We tested the monitor using our calibration and measurement tool, which put its contrast ratio at a very respectable 935:1, with a black level of 0.29cd/m2. Its colour reproduction is absolutely fine for desktop use, movies, and games, although it’s not the best choice for colour-sensitive tasks: our test showed that the screen displayed 88.9% of the sRGB colour gamut, which is around average for a display of this price.

Although we’ve seen better gaming performance from other PCs at this price, the Kaveri Evolution’s AMD A10-7700K processor’s on-chip GPU can still manage less-demanding 3D games at moderate settings. In our Dirt Showdown test, running at at High quality, 4x AA and a resolution of 1,280×720, we saw an average frame rate of 50.8fps. Moving up to 1,920×1,080 and Ultra quality made this drop to 21.2fps. That not smooth enough to be playable, but if you drop the quality to High at the same resolution you’ll see 35.6fps on average, with a minimum of 29.1fps, which is easily smooth enough to play.

Palicomp has overclocked the A10-7700K processor to 4GHz, which gives it a significant performance boost in our application benchmarks. At this clock speed the processor managed an overall score of 72 in our benchmarks, compared to the score of around 67 we usually expect from 7700K processors running at their native 3.4GHz. This processor has an unlocked multiplier, so is simple to overclock without affecting other components, such as the RAM or graphics. The Asus A88XM-Plus motherboard’s UEFI interface makes it easy to adjust the processor’s multiplier, while a chunky Thermalright cooler keeps your processor from overheating under the strain.

The PC’s Zalman case is well cooled, with four quiet fans, and is fairly well proofed against dust and fluff. If you want to add a graphics card in the future, you’ve got around 370mm of depth available in the internal bay. There are two drive cages, providing space at the top for two 5 1/4in drives and an external 3 1/2in one, and at the bottom for four 3 1/2in in drives and a 2 1/2in model. The system is currently equipped with a 1TB hybrid SSHD and a DVD-RW drive. The SSHD has an 8GB solid state cache to help improve the performance of the 1TB hard disk. It certainly helped with boot times; this PC managed to load Windows in just 15s.

The drives use up only two of the motherboard’s eight SATA3 ports. The motherboard also has four memory slots, two of which currently contain 4GB modules of 1,600MHz RAM, and four vacant expansion slots. These include a full-speed PCI-E x16 slot for a primary graphics card, a PCI-E x16 slot that runs at x4 speed, a PCI slot and a PCI-E x1 slot. Note that if you add a graphics card, the x1 slot will almost certainly be rendered inaccessible by the card’s cooler. The motherboard supports both CrossFire and AMD Dual Graphics, which lets you link the processor with an AMD R7 240 or R7 250 discrete graphics card to increase performance.

At the back of the case, the motherboard’s back plate has six USB ports, two of which are USB3, as well a couple of PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectors, three 3.5mm analogue audio outputs that can be configured for surround sound and VGA, DVI and HDMI graphics outputs. There are another three USB ports at the front panel, although only one is USB3, plus the usual mic and headphone ports.

The system is supplied with a budget Cherry mouse and keyboard set. The mouse is oddly angular and takes a bit of getting used to, but the keyboard is one of the better low-cost models you can buy, with keys with plenty of travel and a comfortable layout for touch typing.

With a big, good-quality 24in monitor, a powerful processor that’s been capably overclocked and reasonable upgrade potential, this is quite simply one of the best PCs you can get for £500. It wins our Best Buy award.