Wired2fire Diablo Ultima v2
The speed you need
Gaming PC that works hard for everyone
The whole point of a desktop PC is that it’s an all-purpose computer. You can use it to check your email, see what everyone’s up to on Facebook, read the news online, do your day’s work, book your online shopping, pay your bills, save a batch of photos from your camera, order a takeaway and settle down for a few episodes on Netflix. The same matchbox-sized processor handles all of these tasks without complaint.
Run a 3D game, however, and suddenly that same multi-core computing powerhouse starts complaining that it’s not feeling up to this today and isn’t it meant to be someone else’s job? Chuck 4K footage or a pile of effects on to the timeline in your video software and you’ll get the same reaction, conveyed through stuttery playback. As powerful as the latest processors may be, these tasks are still best served by a dedicated graphics card.
That’s why, when we’re looking for PCS that do everything, we include models marketed specifically to gamers. In most cases they’re also a great choice for the rest of us. This latest model from the very gamingly named system builder Wired2fire is a fine example. Its nod to the joystick-oriented community comes in the form of a Radeon RX 460 graphics card (see our review, Issue 494), which comes from the very bottom of AMD’S current range. In our tests, it kept the most demanding games above a playable 30-plus frames per second (fps) at Full HD resolution with some small tweaks to graphics settings, or over 60fps with some more drastic compromises. Although Radeon cards aren’t quite as widely supported by non-games software as Nvidia’s at the moment, it should also help with most video-editing software.
But if these aren’t your main concerns, the RX 460 only accounts for about 90 quid of the Diablo Ultima v2’s price, and they certainly haven’t skimped on the rest of the components. The i5-7600 processor is a solid mid-range model from Intel’s new Kaby Lake range, and very capable even for demanding jobs. It may lack the multi-tasking clout of the i7 processors, but it shows improvement over the previous Skylake batch, enabling this PC to beat even heavily overclocked i5s from a year or two ago.
There’s a generous 16GB of RAM as standard to keep the processor fed with data, and Wired2fire has also included an extraordinarily fast 256GB M.2 SSD. At over 1.3 gigabytes per second, it was triple the read speed of some SSDS in our tests. That means apps load almost instantaneously, and swapping data between memory and drive – one of the main reasons why Windows can feel sluggish in everyday use – is no longer a noticeable bottleneck. To accommodate all your files, a 2TB hard drive is fitted.
This all comes on a well-equipped Asus Prime B250M-K motherboard in a dull but functional Corsair 88R case. You even get a basic 802.11n Wi-fi card thrown in, which will get you started if your PC isn’t close to your broadband router, even if you might want to add a faster 802.11ac card or dongle later. The only notable limitation is that there are no USB 3.1 or Thunderbolt ports for the fastest external storage options, but of course you can add more SATA 3 drives internally.
In fact, the Diablo Ultima v2 is such a sensible general-purpose PC that Wired2fire might have to think about changing their name to Wired 2 Get Lots of Work Done.
An entry-level gaming PC that’s great for the rest of us