Gadgetory

hi I'm rich Brown for CNET today we're gonna talk about the digital storm bolt so as you can see this is a slim tower desktop and it's actually a really fast gaming PC so this review unit runs about $1,600 and it's a fixed configuration you can make a few tweaks but for the most part what you see on the configurator is what you get here so this is a tiny little design it's about the same size as what we've seen from Falcon Northwest and alienware and there are other slim tower pcs and it's actually not that bad looking there's some fins down here to keep it stable so it doesn't rock from side to side you can see on the front there's the DVD drive as well as here on the side there's some USB ports you've got USB to USB 3 as well as standard analogue audio on the back of the case is a pretty straightforward array of ports you've got USB 2 here as well some ethernet jacks 7.1 audio as well as digital s/pdif audio output you've got a couple wireless antenna jacks right here there's USB 3 down here as well as old-school ps2 if you have an older input device like a joystick or something up here in the graphics card you've got two DVI outputs as well as HDMI and DisplayPort out behind these little plugs so there's no exotic port like Thunderbolt on the system but with what you get you can connect the system in any standard desktop or living room setup so that makes it pretty versatile and lets you take advantage of its small size so I'll go inside the case but before I do that I'll point out that it's actually kind of a paint the cover slides off and it gets stuck sometimes on some of the internal components or some wires here there's a screw down here that gets it away when you put it back on so it looks pretty good on the outside if you'd like to tinker inside your PC you might be annoyed in which digital storm had paid a little bit more attention to the design so in this side of the case you can see there's a geforce gtx 660ti graphics card so that's a nice fast card you can see it's a double wide card and it's got the power connectors up here and that will let you play pretty much any PC game in the market right now in our test it did really well on far cry 2 and some older titles that have built in benchmarks anecdotally we were playing Crysis 3 and far cry 3 at really high resolutions at high image quality and had no problems with the framerate so you might hit the limit of this system before you would on a higher-end PC at least you can know that any game you want to play today will have problem so in this side of the case you can see here's the CPU behind this giant fan note there's not liquid cooling well if you've seen on some of these slim towers and helps keep the price down there's a core i7 3770k CPU here so that's overclockable and digital storm has set the cpu speed to 4.1 gigahertz that's not quite as fast as we've seen elsewhere but again it's fast enough for most gamers and especially considering the price it's not too slow it's sort of hard to tell but there's two memory sticks here for eight gigabytes total you don't have a lot of expansion room so you have to deal with that that's kind of a known limitation of these slim tower systems although you do actually get a fair amount of hard drive space so here's the hard drive stack and there's one 500 gig drive in the back it's a standard mechanical drive in front of that you have a 120 gig solid-state drive here that has the operating system for fast booting you can also add one more solid-state drive here in digital storm even wire the data and power connector is exactly read 1 if you're gonna add a new drive so if you're a truly demanding PC gamer and you want to play it high resolutions are multiple monitors this is probably not the system for you but if you're looking for a lean amine PC for a relatively affordable price the digital storm bolt can certainly get you up and running on any piece of game you want to throw at it so iron rich Brown this is the digital storm bolt