Palicomp Touch Diamond review

The Enforcer chassis comes from Cooler Master’s CM Storm gaming range and, with its red lights, mesh and jutting door, it certainly looks the part. The plastic façade is a little flimsy – the door noticeably wobbles on its hinges – but thankfully build quality is better throughout the rest of the steel case.

The interior is painted black, boasts a separate motherboard tray and is extremely tidy, thanks in part to the modular PSU. It’s sensibly designed and, despite the enclosure’s relatively modest size, there’s a fair amount of upgrade room: the motherboard has pairs of PCI Express x16 and PCI slots (although one of the former runs at 4x speed) and a single PCI Express x1 socket free, and there are four side-facing hard disk bays.

The four DIMM slots are already occupied, and those hard disk bays aren’t tool free. The HD 6970 graphics card is about the longest this case can handle, and the modular PSU doesn’t serve up more than two PCI-Express eight-pin power connectors, so you’ll have to drop a long way down AMD or Nvidia’s ranges before you can run two cards.

Case fans can be found on the front, rear and top of the machine, but the Palicomp still had trouble keeping its cool. The processor is the main culprit: the Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro is a competent budget cooler, but it’s unable to cope with the big overclock – the i5-2500K hit a dangerous peak of 97°C. The dual-fan graphics card was more comfortable, peaking at 69°C.

It’s not exactly a quiet machine, with the reasonable idle rumble escalating to a distracting roar during our more demanding tests. It’s disappointing when compared to the Chillblast, which proved both cool and quiet under pressure.

It’s worth bearing in mind that Palicomp will also sell the Touch Diamond with a Samsung SyncMaster B2430L for the same price; unless you really want to be touch-ready for Windows 8, it’s a good alternative. Even then, we’d still recommend the Chillblast Fusion Flash over this: while it’s marginally slower in games, it’s got a faster SSD, is virtually as quick in applications, and it’s cooler and quieter.