BEAUTIFUL BUT DEADLY
WHEN ALL’S SAID AND DONE, this system is the purest form of awesome. No, seriously—despite how difficult it was to work with, despite the many cuts and bruises we suffered while building, benchmarking, and diagnosing its predicaments, it has to be one of the nicest small form factor systems we’ve ever pieced together. Pictures really don’t do it justice. It’s only once you get inside and realize how tight everything is that its true genius comes to light.
It is equal to the sirens: deadly, but oh so beautiful. That said, there’s a lot here that BitFenix could improve upon. Finding a way to install that power supply from the rear, for instance. Mounting the hard drive caddy so it’s midway up the case pod, giving you room for cable management at the bottom. Bigger holes to allow an easier fit for those titanic GPUs. Better front fan intakes. And even some smarter cable management for that front I/O would have made this thing a dream.
It’s difficult to design a chassis at this form factor, and the Portal is nothing if not exceptional in design. It’s just lacking a few quality of life changes that would make it much easier to work in.
As for performance? Well, that’s a mixed bag, too. Stepping outside of pricing for a moment, it’s incredible. Stomping games at 1440p makes one happy gamer, and having the grunt to render video on the sidelines, too? Well, it can do anything. The SSD storage is exceptionally quick as well—load times feel almost instantaneous in places.
We did have trouble with that Samsung 960 Evo, though, with it seemingly having died since its last build, meaning another stripdown, and replacement with a spare. That aside, storage is as quick as you would expect from a budget PCIe drive from Sammy.
But now we do have to talk about the price, and it’s a tough one to swallow—$550 over the recommended retail price for a GTX 1070 Ti, and a painful $130 more on memory. It’s not a good feeling. On Ryzen’s launch, that could have easily netted you double the memory, an eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X, and a GTX 1080 on top for the same price. However, unfortunately, we no longer live in that world, and until Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix, and every other semi-conductor company get their assets together, it’s one annoyance we’ll have to endure for the time being.