Zoostorm Stormforce Infinity VR Not a pretty PC, but it’s plainly a good choice
No storm in a teacup
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the keener a PC company is to sell you something, the more its name will sound like the title of a 1980s sci-fi cartoon series. In this case the Stormforce Infinity shtick might actually distract you from what Zoostorm considers this PC’S unique selling proposition: virtual reality (VR). Yes, thankss to the latest AMD Radeon RX 480 graphicsaphics cardcard, you can plug in one of this year’s new plastic helmets and prance about in a virtual world of your own.
Or not. Because, even if you don’t want to spend several hundred quid extra to re-enact Disney’s Tron films with an electric Viewmaster strapped to your face, this is an excellent (you could say ‘storming’) all-round PC. The RX 480 has a huge 8GB of its own memory and will satisfy all but the most extreme players of conventional 3D games, and – compatibility permitting – can speed up other programs that use Microsoft Directx, Opencl, Opengl or Vulkan software. Nvidia’s Geforce cards are generally preferred by creative types, but AMD’S support has been catching up.
And that’s not even this machine’s best performance feature. The central processor is a Skylake i7-6700, the fastest chip Intel sells right now. It didn’t so much run our benchmark tests as sprint without pausing for breabreath. Whatever you want to do with your Windows 10 PC, this will probably do it.
The only reservation we have concerns storage. We all know by now that SSDS are faster than conventional hard drives. They’re getting so fast, in fact, that traditional SATA- storage connectors can’t keep up, so the latest drives connect to the Pci-express (PCIE) interface, either through a PCIE card or, in a more compact form, using an M.2 connector. Here you get a 256GB Sandisk M.2 SSD, but it might as well have been on SATA: the fastest read speed we achieved was 512Mbit/s, while write speeds topped out at 319Mbit/s. Those are still good results – just not top of the range. You also get a standard 1TB hard drive for more space, and a DVD writer for old times’ sake.
There’s pretty good scope for expansion within the case, which is a plain Fractal R5 Blackout. There’s nothing really missing here, making this a solid system, albeit for quite a lot of money.
Plain but powerful PC that’ll do everything you need