Wired2Fire HAL 4000 review

We’ve come across many powerful, full-sized desktop PCs from Wired2Fire in the past, but this is the first small-form-factor system to emerge from its factory in Surrey – and the HAL 4000 is a barnstormer.

It gets off to a great start thanks to the Fractal Design Node 304, which is one of the best small-form-factor enclosures we’ve laid eyes on. The brushed aluminium panels make for a classy, understated PC, and the sturdy build quality is a cut above budget cases. If we were to be picky, there’s a little flex in the side panels, but it’s no worse than we’ve experienced on other high-end PCs; the HAL 4000 will easily survive regular trips to gaming events and LAN parties.

The removal of two screws is all it takes to access the PC’s insides, and while the interior is cramped, it’s sensibly organised. The front half of the machine houses the Xigmatek Tauro power supply, and its cables cluster around the Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics card, which extends along one side of the chassis.

The back of the case is dominated by the Antec Kuhler H20 water-cooling unit, which is clamped between two 120mm fans and is attached to the rear exhaust mount. Its liquid-filled cables spiral down towards the Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe motherboard, which is so tiny that many of its VRMs, capacitors and heatsinks are deployed to a daughterboard that lies perpendicular to the black PCB.

Accessing the board is tricky – you’ll have to remove the cooler at the very least – but there will be little need to delve into the Wired2Fire’s innards. The single PCI Express slot is home to the graphics card; both memory sockets are occupied; and the one empty SATA socket runs at the slower SATA/300 speed, so it’s suitable for only a mechanical hard disk. There’s limited room for additional storage: while the Node 304 includes a trio of removable hard disk caddies, one contains two SSDs, another houses a hard disk, and the third is used for keeping extra cables out of the way.

Small-form-factor machines used to lack the power of their full-sized counterparts, but this is no longer the case. Wired2Fire has crammed in an overclocked Intel Core i7-3770K CPU, boosting it from 3.4GHz to 4.4GHz. That’s enough to push the Wired2Fire’s application benchmark score up to 1.25, a result that trounces our A-List machine – the PC Specialist Vortex Destroyer’s Sandy Bridge-E chip scored 1.16.