Wired2Fire Hellspawn Gaming PC - Components and Gaming

Two of the P7P55D-LE motherboard's six SATA2 connectors are taken by the hard drive and optical drive. With the graphics card taking up the board's primary PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot and covering one of the two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots, we have one free x1 slot beside it, a second PCIe x16 slot and three older PCI slots to play with. Unfortunately, though the board claims CrossFireX compatibility, the second x16 slot will only run at x4 when in a dual-card configuration, meaning that CrossFire is not a realistic option. This is a real shame as it somewhat limits the future upgradeability of this gaming PC.

As already mentioned, the Prolimatech Megahalem CPU cooler dominates this build. Its fan will barely clears the heatspreaders of any extra memory you install, and the top of the cooler comes close to touching the case's side panel. The Megahalem is not just for show though, as Wired2Fire has overclocked the Intel Core i5 750 to a nice even 4GHz (well, 3,999.9MHz, if you're being picky). While it's not difficult to achieve a similar overclock on your own, it won't be covered by warranty as this one is. The cooler ensures processor-core temperatures never go above 72 degrees even under the heaviest load.

This boosted CPU is backed by the usual 4GB of DDR3 RAM, in this case twin Corsair 1,600MHz modules with silver heatspreaders. However, as we've said many times before, for gaming pretty much any dual core CPU running at above 2.5GHz available today will do the job, and the graphics card is by far the single most important element of a gaming rig. Wired2Fire has elected to use an AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5850, which scored a perfect 10 out of 10 when we reviewed it. Its combination of superb graphics performance, low power usage and excellent value make it difficult to beat, especially since DirectX11, Dolby TrueHD support and EyeFinity are but some of the unique features it offers.

As such the Hellspawn obviously doesn't break its stride when it comes to the older Call of Duty 4, delivering an impressive 150fps. Crysis is more of a challenge, as even more than two years after its debut it can still bring the most powerful systems to their knees. Indeed, at 1,920 x 1,200 on Very High detail the title was barely playable, with an average frame rate of 24fps. Knocking detail down to High resulted in a smooth experience at the same resolution though, and lowering resolution to something like 1,280 x 800 will allow you to play on Very High without any problems. In Stalker: Call of Pripyat, which is a DirectX 11 game, the Hellspawn also managed an impressive 88fps on maximum detail at 1,920 x 1,200.