Vibox Hive
An ambitious package that stands out from the crowd, with an overclocked Core i5 and a generous 480GB SSD
SCORE ✪✪✪✪✪
PRICE from vibox.co.uk
L£583 (£700 inc VAT) ike many system builders these days, Vibox specialises in high-end gaming hardware – after all, that’s where the money is. And while its Hive system is designed for general-purpose computing, the enthusiast pedigree is immediately betrayed by the distinctive BitFenix Phenom enclosure.
That’s not a bad thing. Although the case has an unusually large 250 x 374mm footprint, we found its low-profile design very appealing. Power controls, audio jacks and two USB 3 ports are built directly into the left-hand side of the case, which is elegant – as long as you weren’t hoping to have that side facing the wall. Interestingly, the motherboard mounts “upside-down” relative to the norm, so the PCI Express slots are at the top of the case. This improves ventilation for heavyweight graphics cards.
Another hint at the Hive’s gaming heritage is the Z170M Mortar motherboard, part of MSI’s Gaming Series. This provides a pair of PCI Express x16 slots, ready for a dualGPU setup or other high-performance upgrades, along with a generous four USB 3 slots at the rear (as well as two regular USB 2 ports) and a set of analogue and digital outputs supporting 7.1 audio.
It also means you get a BIOS that’s well equipped with easy overclocking options, and Vibox has taken full advantage of these to push up the Core i5-6600K processor to an eyebrow-raising 4.4GHz. The resulting benchmark scores more or less match this month’s Core i7-6700 systems: this isn’t a PC that will leave you hanging around.
Mindful that not everyone is a devout gamer, Vibox has taken a conservative path when it comes to graphics, equipping the Hive with a lightweight Nvidia GeForce GT 740 card. This is a step up from Intel’s integrated GPU – at 720p and with high detail, Dirt Showdown purred along at an average of 59fps. But switching up to 1080p caused the frame rate to drop to an average of just 16fps, confirming that this card isn’t the same class as its competitors.
The money saved has instead gone towards a lavish 480GB OCZ SSD. It’s great to have the space to keep your music and personal files on a solidstate drive, rather than having to exile them off to a much slower mechanical disk. However, there might not be enough capacity here for long-term archival of all those videos and downloads, and the Hive doesn’t come with any secondary storage at all.
The SSD is also bottlenecked by its SATA connection, and can’t keep up with the M.2-equipped machines from Palicomp and Wired2Fire. The motherboard does feature an M.2 slot, but it’s specified only for Wi-Fi cards, as its PCI Express x2 bus is too narrow to accommodate the bandwidth of an NVMe drive. The presence of a SATA Express port may seem like a promising alternative, but nobody is making drives that support this standard right now. If you want to fit a faster SSD then you’ll need to buy a standalone M.2 card for the second PCI Express x16 slot.
On the subject of drives, since the Phenom case doesn’t have an aperture for an optical drive, Vibox has thrown in an external USB DVD writer. You may or may not find that useful: we would have preferred a wireless card.
The Hive’s two-year warranty includes only 90 days of carriage and return, but in fairness, if something is going to go wrong then it’s likely to be within that window. In all we found the Vibox Hive, with its stylish case, super-fast processor and capacious SSD, very likeable indeed. But to make it a winner you’d want to add some secondary storage, and either beef up the graphics card or ditch it in favour of an M.2 drive and controller.