We’ve seen quite a few compact PCs over the past couple of issues, and the race for a spot in your living room is hotting up with every release. The latest, Eclipse’s Sky-Cube i5, is among the smallest PCs we’ve seen, with an Antec ISK600 case that’s just 195mm tall and has a footprint of 260x369mm.
It’s one of the cheapest mini-ITX cases you can buy, retailing for around £30. It’s no design icon, with square edges and a boxy shape, but at least it won’t draw attention to itself if you’re after a more subtle kind of PC.
There are two USB ports at the front, one of which is USB3, and a pair of 3.5mm audio jacks. Cinephiles will appreciate the slim Blu-ray drive, although it comes without any software for playing Blu-ray discs, so you’ll need to spend around £45 on CyberLink PowerDVD Pro or something similar.
The Sky-Cube i5 is reasonably quiet, emitting a faint whine when idling that’s audible only if you have the PC right next to you. The power supply is at the front, and there’s a 120mm exhaust fan at the rear. An Arctic Freezer 7 Pro fan and cooler sit atop the Intel Core i5-6600K processor, which is located alongside 8GB of DDR4 RAM.
Eclipse’s decision to use the highest-specification Intel Core i5 processor is sensible given the chasis’ fairly spacious interior. This gives the chip plenty of breathing room to reach its maximum Turbo Boost clock speed of 3.9GHz. It performed admirably in our benchmarks with a score of 102 overall.
It did well in the photo-rendering test, too, scoring 107, and managed an excellent 108 when converting video. However, it fell down somewhat in the multitasking test with a score of 97, which is slightly lower than we’d expect from this processor. Still, its overall performance is hard to argue with. Windows 10 feels snappy and you’re not left waiting for programs to open.
It’s a pity Eclipse didn’t take advantage of the 6600K’s overclocking potential, leaving it at its factory settings. The motherboard is certainly ready for overclocking, and a decent overclock might have been possible if Eclipse had used a slightly more powerful cooler.
An Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 is supplied for graphical grunt. It’s a highly capable card that performs well at Full HD resolutions and beyond, and this showed in our benchmarks. An average frame rate of 115fps in Dirt Showdown at Ultra settings is an excellent result, as is the 47fps it achieved in Metro: Last Light Redux at Very High settings. These results point to a system that will be able to play the latest games at the best settings for at least the next few years.
There isn’t a huge amount of room in the case for expansion. It has three slots for storage drives, including two 2½in mounting points and a third for 3½in disks, but Eclipse has already filled two of these. The primary drive is a 120GB Kingston HyperX Fury SSD. This is a budget model, and while its 462MB/s read speed and 135.6MB/s write speed in the AS SSD benchmarks are fine, they reveal this PC’s budget origins. The second drive, for bulk file storage, is a 2TB Seagate hard disk.
At the rear of the PC, there are six standard USB3 connectors and a USB Type-C port. Your audio needs are covered by five 3.5mm jacks and an optical S/PDIF port. There are also two ports for connecting an external wireless aerial. The graphics card, meanwhile, provides two DVI connectors, an HDMI port and a DisplayPort connector.
Two Gigabit Ethernet ports cater for more advanced networking workloads, but the addition of 802.11ac Wi-Fi is very welcome, as it means you can place this PC anywhere there’s a good Wi-Fi signal rather than having to install cables or buy powerline equipment.
A wireless keyboard and mouse pad are supplied, greatly increasing this PC’s sofa-surfer credentials. This provides a full QWERTY keyboard, a small touchpad and dedicated media buttons. It’s extremely handy, especially when you just want to use the PC to watch YouTube or Netflix. You wouldn’t want to use the keyboard for long typing sessions, and gaming is well beyond its reach, but it’s excellent for sofa-based browsing.
The Eclipse Sky-Cube i5 faces stiff competition from other custom compact PCs, such as the incredible Mesh Elite Voyager Mini CS, which costs just £50 more. The Eclipse Sky-Cube i5 is a fair bit smaller, however, thanks to its more compact chassis, and it still provides excellent gaming performance for the money, making it a good buy for your living room.
VERDICT
A compact but powerful gaming PC with a Blu-ray drive and 802.11ac Wi-Fi.
SPECIFICATIONS
PROCESSOR Quad-core 3.5GHz Intel Core i5-6600K • RAM 8GB • FRONT USB PORTS 1x USB2, 1x USB3 • REAR USB PORTS 6x USB3, 1x USB3 Type-C • TOTAL STORAGE 120GB SSD, 2TB hard disk • GRAPHICS CARD 4GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 • DISPLAY None • OPERATING SYSTEM Windows 10 Home 64-bit • WARRANTY Three years