Aria Gladiator Enterprise
Gladiator PC fights its corner
The last desktop PC we tested from this long-established British brand (see our review, Issue 492) made do with a modest Intel i3 processor to leave room in its £600 price for a brand new Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 graphics card. This time they’ve left out the graphics card to squeeze a notably more powerful Kaby Lake i5 processor into an even tighter £500 budget. For general users who don’t need to play 3D games or boost the speed of graphics software, that’s on the face of it a much better deal.
The specific Intel processor used here, the i5-7400, produced mixed results in our tests. Its Achilles heel is multitasking. Despite having four cores, it’s not especially comfortable doing several things at once – at least according to our benchmark tests. In actual use, we didn’t notice any problems flipping between windows and programs.
More importantly, it scored highly in our demanding photo- and video-editing tests, proving capable enough for everyday Windows 10 tasks. If you do play the occasional game, the built-in HD Graphics 630 components will cope with the resolution and detail settings turned down, and its support for Microsoft Directx 12, Opengl 4.4 and Opencl 2.0 means creative programs that require graphics processing should also work fine, if not as fast as with a more advanced GPU.
To keep things chugging along, the 1TB hard drive is accompanied nied by a 250GB SSD. SSD speeds vary widely dely these days, so we were pleased to find nd this one hit rates of over 450MB/S whenhen both reading and writing files. That’s something you won’t see with systemsms that use hybrid drives or Intel Optane (see Issue 505, page 28) to boost the speed of a hard drive at a lower cost.
There’s not much else inside the plainlain black Aerocool case, which has a tidy front panel above a large mesh grille. If you want a DVD drive, memory cardrd reader, Wi-fi or other additions you can add them on Gladiator’s website for a reasonable extra cost.
Something that does come as standarddard is an Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler, a more sophisticated fan than the one Intel normally includes. The i5-7400 doesn’tsn’t heat up too much, so the point here is not to deliver more cooling but to generateate less noise, and it works. The Enterprisese runs almost silently, a definite plus if it’s a PC you’ll be sitting next to while working on something else.
For future expansion there’s a spare 3.5in drive bay and four 2.5in mounts, as well as a 5.25in optical drive bay and an M.2 socket for the fastest SSDS. The Asus H110M/A micro-atx motherboard is fa fairly basic, so you just get two me memory slots, one PCIE x16 for a graphics card and two x1 for mi miscellaneous add-ons.
Although there are plenty of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports (iincluding three on the front), th there’s no USB 3.1 for to top-speed external storage. Th That’s not a big problem when yo you can easily add drives in inside. Gigabit Ethernet is in included for wired network co connection – always the pr preferred option for your main PC PC, as long as your broadband ro router is close enough – and th there are HDMI, DVI and VGA monitor outputs.
Although there may not be a lot of features to shout about, it’s great to see a PC with this level of all-round ability for 500 quid. With no big compromises on either processor or storage, the Gladiator Enterprise is unlikely to disappoint.
All-round capability and lots of features at a reasonable price