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The first thing we noticed when removing the side panels from the Alpha Pulse was that two of the thumbscrews were missing, one on either panel. We expect that Palicomp's engineers forgot to replace them after building the system.
As soon as the side panel is removed it's easy to see that Palicomp's engineers took some care when selecting components for this system and when building it. Most of the components compliment each other aesthetically as there is a blue theme throughout.
They have put a lot of effort into cable management as the cables are all tied up neatly behind the motherboard tray, meaning there are very few cables restricting airflow through the chassis.
Palicomp have chosen to use a Corsair H100 all-in-one liquid cooler which we reviewed here. This type of cooler is ideal for a pre-built system as it stresses the motherboard much less than a large heatsink like the Noctua NH-D14 due to the low weight of the CPU block.
Large heatsinks like the NH-D14 can cause significant damage to a motherboard during transit which is why very few system builders use it, despite the performance.
At the heart of the Alpha Pulse we find an Asus P8Z77-V motherboard with an Intel Core i7 3770K processor and 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance Blue 1866 MHz memory. Palicomp have overclocked this to 4.6 GHz to give you a little extra performance.
They have also installed a powerful Palit GeForce GTX 670 graphics card which should provide enough performance to play all the latest games at high settings.
We find an XFX Pro Series 850W power supply powering the system which is a very good quality unit which we reviewed here.
Palicomp has all the bases covered when it comes to storage, combining a speedy Crucial M4 128 GB SSD with a Seagate Momentus 2 TB 7200 RPM drive for storage.
looks like a good selection of components but im not impressed with the case either. Thermaltake make shoddy cases generally. low cost materials etc.
looks like a nice system, but id rather build my own, as Henry said, dont like this case at all.
Just like me if you are a great fan of gaming computers then you should check out the online shop.
£1399.99 now…
Price increases in this case are reasonable and understandable.
The world’s components are traded in dollars.
At the time it was reviewed, the US dollar was relatively weak – with a value of around $1.65 to £1
The pound now only buys just over $1.50 – which is a drop of almost 10%
That 10% movement will translate into a cost increase of around the same value
If a company submits a machine for review and changes it within 28 days, then we will launch a FULL investigation… But a change after many months where the source of the change is (a) clear and (b) outside the supplier’s control is fine
We hope you agree 🙂