On sale on the high street

Training sales assistants costs money – as does maintaining large high-street shops. You might imagine that these overheads would make PC World much more expensive than a specialist retailer, but its size allows it to buy in bulk, and negotiate discounts that smaller operators may be unable to match.

So does the high street offer good value? As it happens, the firm is currently selling a standalone Windows 10 desktop for £699.99 – namely, the MSI Nightblade MI2 (

At first glance the Nightblade looks like it would fit right into this month’s Labs, with its Skylake Core i5 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 graphics card. It also comes with an 802.11ac wireless card, Bluetooth 4 and a DVD writer, and offers a USB Type-C port at the rear.

When it comes to performance, though, the Nightblade disappoints. Its Core i5-6400 processor runs at a nominal 2.7GHz: we’d expect it to score in the mid-90s in our benchmarks, which would place it at the bottom of this month’s pack.

The Nightblade also comes with only 8GB of RAM, rather than the 16GB supplied by almost all of our Labs participants. While 8GB should be plenty for the foreseeable future, when the price of the system is the same as the PCs here, it’s obviously a worse deal.

The final let-down is that the Nightblade doesn’t come with an SSD. All you get is a single 1TB mechanical drive for both OS and data – and if anything goes wrong, MSI’s two-year warranty is strictly return-to-base.

In all, you get much less for your money than if you’d chosen any of the ten systems on test this month. And while PC World does offer a price-match guarantee, it won’t cover a bespoke system. There may be advantages to buying on the high street, but when your decision comes down to the bottom line, the online specialists are still the way to go.