Unlike the other PCs in this round-up, the 24in Chillblast Volante AIO has been built into an off-the shelf all-in-one housing. This shows in its somewhat boxy design, which can’t quite match the style and ergonomics of all-in-ones designed by the manufacturer. However it’s considerably better-looking than early ‘DIY’ systems and, provided you look at it face-on, you probably won’t see the joints. You’ll get a surprise if you try to pick it up, though, as it weighs more than 5kg more than a 27in iMac. That said, the Volante AIO is one of the fastest AIO PCs we’ve seen. Beaten only by Apple’s considerably more expensive 27in iMac, the Volante AIO features a desktop-class 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 4790S processor supporting turbo speeds of up to 4.0GHz. The PC also features a full 16GB of DDR3 RAM, and comes with a full terabyte of solid-state storage in the form of a Samsung EVO SSD. The latter gives the Volante AIO untouchable storage performance. The all-in-one PC is very quiet under normal load, but gets much louder very quickly when pushed to the limit with both the CPU fan and graphics cooler contributing to the cacophony. The graphics card in question is an nVidia GeForce GT 750M graphics card, delivering performance good enough for gaming and making the Chillblast Volante AIO a whole lot faster than many rival systems, although it’s not up to the standard of the 27in iMac. Also unlike the iMac is its 24in display with 1920 by 1080 resolution. This is perfectly adequate for a home PC, but obviously nowhere near the size or resolution of the iMac, which costs £700 more. No touch input is supported, but it’s available as an optional extra for £109 ex VAT and can be retrofitted to an existing system if you decide you want to add the feature later. The display performs well, with accurate colour and better than average brightness and contrast and is complemented by a pair of stereo speakers for multimedia use. They don’t sound amazing, but they’re much better than either the Asus (without additional subwoofer) or MSI AIO PCs can manage. The Volante AIO is also the only PC here to include a Blu-ray player as standard. As is usual for Chillblast, the Volante AIO PC is covered by a full 2-year collect-and-return warranty with five years warranty on labour.
