Housed in a Corsair Spec 03 system case, the Diablo Reactor has rugged, industrial-looking features which will are sure to attract wide appeal. Its imposing front grille fronts a red LED-lit intake fan, concealed behind a matt black mesh, while the transparent side panel gives you a good view of the internal components. See all PC reviews. Contrasting the matt black-on-black of the exterior, the first thing you’ll notice when looking inside is the large Rajintek Themis CPU heatpipe cooler, with its large red and white fan assembly. With the Core i5 processor overclocked from 3.5GHz up to an ambitious 4.5GHz, the cooler certainly has its work cut out, but it managed to keep the processor to a maximum of 86 degrees under full load working in consort with the two bright white illuminated 120mm front case fans and an additional 120mm fan at the rear. Storage comes in the form of a capacious 240GB SSDNow solid state drive, which ensures short boot times and quick game loading. However, with no supplementary hard drive included, that 240GB of storage space starts to look rather less impressive; even a small collection of games could see this SSD filling up rather quickly. We appreciate the desire to keep the price below the psychologically significant £1,000 price point, but the relatively small cost of an additional hard drive would be well worth it and there’s plenty of room for expansion upgrades inside the case, above an LG DVD-RW combo drive. Also see: Best gaming laptops 2015.
Wired2Fire Diablo Reactor review: internal components
At the heart of the system sits an Asus Z97-P ATX form factor motherboard, featuring Intel’s Premium Z97 Express chipset with full official support for overclocking and a fully-featured UEFI BIOS for advanced performance tweaking and graphical fan speed control. It also supports Intel RAID and M.2 storage devices as future upgrades. Four USB 3.0 ports are provided at the rear of the case, along with a pair of USB 2.0. Two more USB 3.0 connectors are wired through to the front panel of the case. A generous 16 GB of 1600Mz RAM is included which, combined with the overclocked processor and SSD storage, helps the Diablo Reactor to achieve some of the best performance scores we’ve seen from a Gaming PC in this price range. With a PC Mark 8 2.0 Home score of 5576 points, it outpaces even Dino PC’s Dark Spark GTX 960 which features a faster processor overclock to 4.6GHz. Gaming performance is also superb, thanks to an overclocked MSI-branded Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 graphics card with 4GB of RAM. If you can afford one, this card delivers much better frame rates than the GeForce GTX 960 found in some competing systems – enough to allow you to configure noticeably higher quality settings in your games. The Diablo Reactor is supplied with a 24in Asus VS247HR monitor – a basic entry-level model, but with a fast 2ms response time ideal for gaming. Also included is a Cooler Master CM Storm Devastator gaming keyboard and mouse set, featuring cool LED backlighting and angular stylings which match the design of the system case. Also see: Best gaming PCs 2015.
