Review: Novatech iReign i7

If Novatech’s iReign i7 looks a little familiar, that’s because the chassis – with its meshed plastic drive bays, matte-black finish and angled front – has obviously taken inspiration from the classic Antec Three Hundred.

That’s no bad thing: its build quality and range of features are surprisingly good for a budget chassis and, while it isn’t the most extravagant enclosure, it certainly isn’t ugly. In some departments the Novatech actually goes beyond Antec’s design. There’s a motherboard tray, for instance, and an eSATA port on the front accompanied by a good selection on the rear, with eSATA and four USB 3 ports.

In most other areas, though, Novatech fails to build on this promising foundation. That motherboard tray is largely wasted: cables from the modular PSU are bunched in the bottom of the chassis or lashed haphazardly throughout, instead of being tidied away. The one free 5.25in bay and the vacant SATA sockets are obstructed by cables, while a USB 3 PCI riser card blocks off the single PCI Express x1 slot.

The relatively modest specification at least ensures the iReign is cool and quiet. Peak processor and graphics card temperatures of 76°C and 69°C are fine, and while there’s a definite hum while idle, we were pleased to note that it barely became louder during our stress tests.

The chip that gives the iReign its name, the Core i7-2600K, has proven itself a fine performer in the past, and that’s no different here – a nice round benchmark score of 1 shows there’s plenty of power. We’d have preferred it overclocked, though: the £1,199 inc VAT Palicomp Phoenix i5 Z68 Warrior boosted the 3.3GHz Core i7-2500K to 4.8GHz and scored a mighty 1.17 in the same tests.

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card is bolstered by Gigabyte’s overclocking – the core has been boosted from 822MHz to 900MHz, and the shaders from 1,645MHz to 1,800MHz – but it still falls behind rivals. An average of 43fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test is good, but the Palicomp scored 55fps in the same test.

The rest of the specification is better, with two 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 hard disks arranged in a RAID0 array, alongside 8GB of DDR3 RAM. The Blu-ray reader is accompanied by a separate DVD writer, too.

But the Novatech’s main problem is the strength of the competition: the Palicomp, for example, can be bought without a monitor to bring its price down to £1,099 inc VAT. When that PC can pack so much more into a similar price there’s little reason left to buy the Novatech, which is too slow and too basic to mount a serious challenge.