System builder Palicomp specialises in producing some seriously overclocked machines for enthusiasts and gamers. Earlier this year we were very impressed by its i5 Sniper, and the i5 Z68 Warrior is the next step up when it comes to the firm's Sandy Bridge range.

Heart of the warrior
The system is built around the current gamer's favourite processor, the Intel i5 2500K, which hits the price/performance sweet spot when it comes to fluid frame rates. As with the Sniper, this CPU has been boosted with a major overclock to 4.8GHz. The Warrior is also housed in the same Coolermaster CM690 II Advanced case, but that's where the similarities between the two machines end... and the upgrades begin.

Inside the case are three case fans to keep the innards cool and an 850W power supply. The PSU brand is Powercool, not one we're familiar with, but it's a quiet model, an ample wattage, and the machine remained completely stable throughout the review period. A ThermalTake ISGC-3000 is the choice of CPU cooler, a quality air cooling solution.

Where the Sniper has a VTX Radeon 6950 graphics card, the Warrior takes a step up to the 6970 with 2GB of onboard memory, the processor having been overclocked to a core speed of 950MHz. The system memory has been quadrupled to a whopping 16GB of Corsair DDR3 1600MHz RAM. While that's overkill for gaming - you only really need 8GB - it's certainly future-proofed.

Cache in hand
The optical drive is a Samsung Blu-ray combo, and the motherboard is an Asus P8Z68-V, which features the Z68 chipset referred to in the Warrior's full name. The Z68 chipset boasts one particular neatly feature which Palicomp has exploited here - Intel Smart Response Technology, also known as 'SSD caching'.

The Warrior's main hard disk is a 2TB Hitachi drive, but it also has a Kingston V+ Now 64GB solid state disk (SSD) set up as a smart cache. What Intel smart caching does, in basic terms, is keep your most frequently accessed files on the SSD. In other words, the applications and games you use the most will end up having their primary files cached on the SSD to make them quicker to access, and the system far more responsive in operation. Should you stop using something, its files will eventually be shunted off the SSD cache in favour of files you're making regular use of.

Thus, you constantly have nippy performance where it matters the most, without having to worry about what's installed on the SSD - everything just goes on the capacious main hard disk. Given the increasingly large install sizes of games these days, you'd need a large and very expensive SSD if you were looking squeeze this kind of improved performance out of a solid-state drive alone if you wanted to fit a decent amount of them on. Smart caching is a great budget alternative, in which a smaller SSD suffices.

That's the theory, anyway, and Smart Response Technology works pretty well in reality. It's easy to observe the effect because the first time you run a program, it loads off the main HDD. The second time, it has been cached on the SSD, so loads much more quickly. Testing out the loading times of a few games produced some impressive results.

Company: Palicomp

Website: http://www.palicomp.co.uk/

Contact: Palicomp on 01270 898104

Tags: ssd overclocked smart caching gaming pc intel core i5 z68