Wired2Fire Diablo Reactor family PC review

The Diablo Reactor is designed to be a family PC but, thanks to the large Zalman Z3 Plus system case with its transparent side panel, appears rather like an entry-level gamer system. See also: What’s the best family PC?

It performs rather like an entry-level gaming system too. With a 3.4 GHz Intel Core i5-4670 quad-core processor at the helm and an AMD Radeon R7 265 graphics card, you know some games are bound to find their way on to the Wired2Fire Diablo Reactor. In our graphics tests, this PC held its own against the competition, turning in fast framerates similar to Chillblast’s Fusion Pharaoh; but costing a whopping £130 less.

Discounting the monitor-less Quiet PC UltraNUC Pro XL, the Diablo Reactor combines the fastest gaming performance with the lowest overall price of the family PCs we have reviewed recently. An impressive feat indeed, and yet one major omission prevents us from awarding this PC a Best Buy award.

You will notice that the PCMark benchmark numbers are a little low, especially in the area of storage. This is because the Diablo Reactor has no SSD, leaving the slow 1 TB hard drive as a serious performance bottleneck. The result is a powerful PC at a frankly fantastic price which will play the occasional game at breakneck speeds – but in day-to-day use feels disappointingly sluggish despite its fast processor.

Give us this PC with an SSD or a hybrid hard drive instead of the graphics card and we’d be all over it. The value for money here is truly outstanding, but its tremendous strengths are all in the wrong place for a family PC. For £70 a decent 120 GB SSD could have added to the price, and it would still have left this PC with far and away the best value for money.

A 24in TN-based monitor from AOC and a Lite-On DVD writer are included, both of which are acceptable at this price. See all PC reviews.

Wired2Fire Diablo Reactor family PC benchmarks

• PCMark 7 Overall Score    3938
• PCMark 7 Lightweight Score    3332
• PCMark 7 Productivity    2716
• PCMark 7 Entertainment    4527
• PCMark 7 Creativity    5884
• PCMark 7 Computation    7768
• PCMark 7 System Storage    2063
• PCMark 8 2.0 Home    4520
• PCMark 8 2.0 Work    4705
• PCMark 8 2.0 Creative    5110
• PCMark 8 2.0 Storage    2584
• Alien vs Predator (fps)    83 / 44
• Sniper Elite V2 (fps)    240 / 76 /18
• Final Fantasy XIV Creation Benchmark (fps)    205 / 49
• Power Consumption Idle / Load (watts)    45 / 234