PC Specialist’s Hailstorm GT is notable for two reasons. The first, its £899 price, means it undercuts most of its gaming PC rivals – and the second, found on the inside, is the Skylake processor. The mid-range price means that PC Specialist hasn’t opted for a top-tier processor inside the Hailstorm GT. Instead, it’s slotted in a Core i5-6600K. The quad-core chip doesn’t have Hyper-Threading, which is the biggest difference compared with Core i7 parts, but PC Specialist has given it a serious boost by overclocking it to 4.6GHz.
The use of Skylake means a new motherboard, and in this case, it’s an Asus Z170-P. The new chipset means a host of new features: it’s the first time we’ve seen DDR4 memory supported outside of Haswell-E, and there are better options for M.2 SSDs, and more PCI-E 3 lanes across the board.
Elsewhere, the motherboard is pretty basic. It has dedicated audio circuitry and plenty of free headers, but no enthusiast features such as on-board buttons and displays, and its back panel serves up two PS/2 ports, three audio jacks and two USB 2 ports, but only four USB 3 connections – a tad disappointing given that the Z170 chipset supports ten USB 3 ports. Meanwhile, the board’s free M.2 connector can fully use the speed on offer from its 4x PCI-E 3 interface, and a single 16x PCI-E slot is vacant, alongside pairs of 1x PCI-E and PCI slots.
As well as the Skylake CPU, the other star of the show is a Zotac Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 card, which runs at stock speed but is a great inclusion at this price, and there’s 16GB of 2666MHz DDR4 RAM too. You even get a 240GB Kingston HyperX Fury SSD for your money, and it’s partnered with a 2TB hard disk, covering all the fundamental storage bases.
The plastic and metal Corsair Carbide Spec-03 case doesn’t look particularly exciting, but you can’t expect everything at this price. It looks like the gaming enclosures of old, with dramatic slats, angles and cutaway sections, along with a bulging window in the side panel.
The case has dust filters and a 120mm fan at the front that illuminates the interior with a red LED, but its cable-routing holes aren’t routed with rubber. PC Specialist hasn’t done the best job with cable tidying either – the bottom of the motherboard, in particular, is a mess of SATA cables. Meanwhile, storage can be added with room for two more 3.5in drives, another 2.5in drive and there’s a free 5.25in bay too.
However, most of these bays are currently home to spare cables, which will need to be removed first. Also, the plastic used for the slats and the 5.25in drive bay cover at the front feels flimsy, and the thin metal used for the top panel is similarly weak.
Likewise, the warranty has also been victim to cost cutting. The Hailstorm includes one year of parts and labour coverage, but only the first month is collect and return. After the first year, you then get a further two years of labour-only return to base cover.
Performance
The Hailstorm’s overclocked i5-6600K returned a fantastic score of 64,459 in our image editing test – a benchmark that relies on single-threaded speed, and which sees this sub-£1,000 machine even beating the Haswell-E based Overclockers Titan Riptide. With four cores at its disposal, the Core i5’s video encoding score of 258,117 was also very reasonable, particularly considering the price of this machine.
PC Specialist’s machine returned an overall score of 119,982, which is an excellent result, making it 4.83 per cent faster than our Devil’s Canyon Core i7 reference machine.
The PC Specialist’s good form continued in gaming tests, where the Hailstorm’s GTX 970 easily beat the R9 380 in the £999 Computer Planet Next Day 4000 i7 Gaming PC. This £899 PC never dropped below 30fps in any of our game tests, even at 2,560 x 1,440, giving it the edge over the Overclockers Titan Riptide in Crysis 3.
The Hailstorm’s storage tests were conclusive, too. The PC Specialist’s Kingston SSD returned speeds of 519MB/ sec and 429MB/sec in our AS-SSD sequential read and write tests, which are plenty fast enough.
Despite the high overclock, the otherwise mid-range specification meant this PC didn’t cause any thermal headaches either. The CPU and GPU delta Ts topped out at 59°C and 60°C respectively, which is fine. We were pleased by the Hailstorm’s noise output, too. It was quiet when idle, and the noise only rose slightly during stress testing. Plus, even then, the noise was modest and consistent.
Conclusion
The PC Specialist Hailstorm GT is an £899 gaming tower, which means compromises have to be made to meet the budget. On the plus side, it’s great to see a Skylake PC with a GTX 970 for this price, and the performance is superb for the money, particularly in games.
What’s more, the new motherboard chipset means there’s room to grow as well. On the downside, the cheaper case isn’t great, and PC Specialist could have paid better attention to its cable tidying – we expect a better standard from professional PC makers, even at this price, which loses the Hailstorm some design points.
In every other key department, though, the Hailstorm is an excellent PC for the money, prioritising speed over frills. If you’re looking for a PC for 2,560 x 1,440 gaming, but have a tight budget, then this machine is a great contender. MIKE JENNINGS
VERDICT
Amazing performance for the money, playing all our test games at 2,560 x 1,440 and even including a Skylake CPU.
SPECIFICATIONS
CPU 3.5GHz Intel Core i5-6600K overclocked to 4.6GHz
Motherboard Asus Z170-P
Memory 16GB Kingston Hyper-X Fury 2666MHz DDR4
Graphics Zotac GeForce GTX 970 4GB
Storage 240GB Kingston HyperX Savage SSD, 2TB Seagate hard disk
Case Corsair Carbide Spec-03
Cooling CPU: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo with 1 x 120mm fan; GPU: 1 x 70mm fan; Front: 1 x 120mm fan; rear: 1 x 120mm fan
PSU Corsair CS650M 650W
Ports Front: 2 x USB 3, 2 x audio; Rear: 4 x USB 3, 2 x USB 2, 3 x audio, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet, 2 x PS/2
Operating System Windows 10 Home 64-bit
Warranty One year parts and labour, plus two years labouronly. First month collect and return, followed by return to base coverage