WIRED2FIRE PYRO RYZEN NOIR
Big performance in a compact system, the Pyro Ryzen Noir is perfect for anyone with limited space
In a test dominated by hulking systems, the Wired2Fire Pyro Ryzen Noir stands out by being more compact. Wired2Fire still crams in a similar spec to Palicomp, but does so in a Cooler Master MasterBox Lite 3 microATX case that stands just 378mm high and 180mm wide.
This approach has its downsides. The MasterBox Lite 3 doesn’t allow for much in the way of sophisticated cable management, for instance, although Wired2Fire has neatly tied and clipped the cabling. There’s little acoustic dampening, and while the fan noise is hardly obnoxious, you can hear the coolers speed up and hum louder when running demanding apps. And while we’re not huge fans of bombastic PC illuminations, the Wired2Fire’s transparent side panel seems unnecessary when there are only a few dim glows to gawk at.
You also have to live with limited expansion potential. You can cram another 16GB of RAM into the two free DIMM slots or add another drive inside the 5.25in cage at the top of the machine – even add an M.2 drive in the empty motherboard slot – but that’s about it. Plus, while you could squeeze in a PCI-E 3 x1 card below the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, there’s not much room for anything bigger than a Wi-Fi card.
If you want to replace the GTX 1050 Ti with a next-generation Nvidia card based on Volta technology, though, note the chassis can fit in cards up to 345mm long, while the MasterWatt 500 Lite power supply has the two 6+2-pin PCI-E power connectors and the juice to measure up.
Power consumption is another strong suit. While the six-core Ryzen 5 1600 uses more energy at stock speeds than comparable Intel Core i5 CPUs, the GTX 1050 Ti is a cool-running, energy-efficient GPU. Even running
Rise of the Tomb Raider at 1440p, our power meter barely went above 130W.
With a 240GB SanDisk SSD and a 1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD, there’s ample storage for now, although performance from the SSD is disappointing. The AS-SSD benchmark tracked sequential read speeds at just 401.4MB/sec with sequential write speeds down at 91.5MB/sec. That makes it the slowest SSD in any system on test, but it’s worth noting that neither boot times nor application loading times suffer.
In every other respect, the Wired2Fire is a solid, sometimes excellent performer. The manufacturer has put most of its budget into the six-core, 12-thread CPU and 16GB of DDR4-2400 RAM, and this helps the system power through mainstream 2D applications. It’s above average when running single, high-throughput applications, but push it harder with multiple demanding tasks and it pulls ahead of the pack, coming second only to the overclocked Palicomp.
3D performance is a different story, just because the GTX 1050 Ti is no match for the GTX 1060 GPUs in other systems. Casual gamers shouldn’t panic – both Metro: Last Light and
Rise of the Tomb Raider ran at over 50fps with high settings at 1080p– but if you’re looking to up the visual splendour or the resolution, you’re going to need something with a little more beef. Ditto if you’re looking at VR and mixed reality, where the Steam VR test gave the Wired2Fire a mediocre 5.6 quality score ( see p87).
This shouldn’t put you off what’s otherwise a great little desktop, with more than enough power for photoediting or 4K video-editing, plus some gaming on the side. It hasn’t got the beef of the Mesh, CyberPower and Palicomp systems, but not every home or office has the space. If you want performance in a slightly smaller form factor, the Wired2Fire gives you exactly what you need.