Digital Storm Bolt review: small package, small price, big performance - smithwhossel

At a Glance

Skillful's Rating

Pros

Lots of power for its size
Compact and quiet
Stays surprisingly cool for being and then cramped

Cons

The deal is a annoyance to remove
Badly placed frontal audio frequency and USB ports
Will be a pain to upgrade

Our Verdict

Digital Storm's Bolt packs a great deal of power into a very small place. It's an intriguing gaming machine with an entrancing price tag.

Digital Storm's Bolt doesn't attend as daunting as those ginormous gaming PCs that glow and drive up a fractional of your desk, but don't countenance this machine's slender profile fool you. This little monster is full with powerful components and stands ready to crush whatever mettlesome that gets in its manner.

Design and ports

Measuring just 3.6 inches wide, 14 inches tall, and 15 inches deep, the Bolt is the Micro Machine of execution systems.

This sleek rig International Relations and Security Network't plastered with decals, and it doesn't boast a fancy paint job surgery bright LEDs that can double every bit a nightlight. It's available in just cardinal colours: white or gunmetal gray. The only laurel wreath apart from the stylishly functional black line vents is the DigitalStorm and Bolt logos. The design is fetchingly minimalist.

The front of the system of rules houses only the DVD drive, and that's about all that would fit. Cardinal USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, and the microphone and speaker jacks are inconveniently located on the derriereright-hand side of the case, which means you'll atomic number 4 dropping to your work force and kneesfrom each one time you need to plug in a flip drive or your headphones.

The rear of the system has plenty of ports and video options.

Four more USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two ethernet ports, and two antenna connections are around the back, along with all the audio ports and more video outputs than you'll ever need. The Nvidia GeForce GTX 660Ti graphics card prat drive improving to four displays using any combination of DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort. However, given that there's no room wrong the caseful for adding storage, IT would have been nice to have an eSATA port here.

It's what's inside that counts

No matter what type of desktop rig you corrupt, you're going to crack it open from time to time. Whether you'Re swapping dead components Beaver State just evicting scatter bunnies, you'll need to be careful dismantling this intricate stupefy.

The blanket is a pain to take when cables are plugged into the back. Unlike the veritable case, where the side panel comes off, the Bolt's smooth shell slides off the rachis. Cables get involved in the mix and tear along the way, so it's just easier to open it up wheneverything is unplugged.

Our eval unit of measurement came with a 120GB SSD and a 500GB 7200 RPM mechanical driving, and there was just enough space to accommodate one many SSD as an ultimate upgrade. The setup dismiss also be configured to house cardinal nourished-sized drives if you opt out of SSDs.

Intimately the stallion motherboard (a Gigabyte Empire State of the South-Z77N-WIFI) is covered by the heat go down and a120mm fan, which you'll need to withdraw in order to access the motherboard's single PCIe slot and its two DIMM slots.

Performance

Enough with the looks, this International Relations and Security Network't a fashion evidenc—so Lashkar-e-Taiba's rile the number crunching. The Bolt of lightning's Intel Substance i7 3770K and 8GB of DDR3/1600 RAM managed to crank out a banging 201 connected our Worldbench 7 benchmark suite. That's much double the mark of our baseline system from a package well-nigh half its size. If that International Relations and Security Network't enough functioning for you, the CPU's multiplier is unlocked and begs to be overclocked.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 660Ti also produced some sensational benchmarks: We ran both Crysis 2 and DiRT 3 at 2560-by-1600 pixel solvingwith settings on ultra to really put the system to figure out. It averaged 54.1 frames per second on Grease 3, and 28 frames per second on Crysis 2. Soil 3 looked silky smooth and nearly hit that coveted 60 frames-per-second mark. Crysis 2 struggled just a trifle, but remained thoroughly playable. Taking the game's settings down to high produced an average 44.6 frames per second, piece dropping the resolution to a much more common resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels with settings at high produced intermediate frame rate of 80.6 frames per second.

When you put high-end components in a lowercase software system and flow them hard, heat usually becomes an issue. But the Bolt is dressed to the nines in fans and vents and manages to stay both cool and quiet. I had it running compensate next to me, at ear level, for an entire sidereal day and barely noticed its noise signature.

Bottom line

Digital Storm's Go off packs beefy mogul into a slim, turned on package. It's a morsel of headache to get inside, but you shouldn't want to ascent this machine for some hereafter. This is a great choice for a PC gamer with a smaller room and a smaller budget. It testament fit anywhere, play anything, and it's priced right at $1599.