Palicomp Alpha Pulse Gaming PC Review

Palicomp supply the Alpha Pulse with no bloatware installed at all.  In fact, the only program installed on the system aside from the system drives was MSI Afterburner for overclocking the graphics card.  They have included install files for AVG antivirus and OpenOffice should you want them, though.

The Intel Core i7 3770K CPU is pre-overclocked to 4.6 GHz by Palicomp's engineers.  This is reasonably impressive for a pre-overclocked system and is similar to what we've seen other manufacturers offering.

We would have liked to see Palicomp pushing it to 4.7 or 4.8 GHz for this particular model, though, considering the high performance CPU cooler which could handle increased voltage without a problem.

See validation here.

Unlike a lot of manufacturers, Palicomp have also pre-overclocked the graphics card – this is very unusual.  The GPU clock speed has been boosted by 100 MHz to 1015 MHz and the Memory clock has been boosted by 100 MHz to 1600 MHz.  The Corsair Vengeance memory is running at stock settings of 1866 MHz with timings of 9-10-9-27.

Testing Methodology

For testing today we will be using a combination of synthetic and real world tests.

Software:

PCMark 7
3DMark 11
SiSoft Sandra 2012 SP3
Cinebench R11.5
CrystalDiskMark
Cyberlink MediaEspresso 6.5
VLC Media Player
Performance Monitor
Unigine Heaven Benchmark
Super Pi 1.5 Mod
CPUID Hardware Monitor
CPU-Z
DiRT Showdown
Max Payne 3
Battlefield 3
PowerDVD 12

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