Vibox Black Legion

The Vibox Black Legion has up in worth from £1,050 to £1,200 owing to inevitable will increase in part costs since we have a tendency to originally tested the laptop back in August. Apologies for the late publication of this review and any confusion caused

Despite having a reputation that is somewhere between a support unit in an exceedingly fantasy RTS and a rather unimaginative death metal band, the Vibox Black Legion could be a rather amazing piece of kit. we have a tendency to particularly like its Corsair atomic number 6 600T case, that is gigantic, serious and bright designed, notably if you wish to tinker and upgrade your laptop.

The case’s facet panels square measure command in situ by chunky clips and hinge open swimmingly to produce access to the case's giant internal bay. there is many space within due to its nice length. you'll even take away the central drive cage to accommodate the most important graphics cards, do you have to attempt to upgrade to 1 within the future. there is not one sharp or perhaps slightly unfinished edge to be found, either.

The left-hand facet panel includes a mesh grille designed into it, with mounting points for up to four extra fans. As it is, the grille provides you a rather sensible read of the case's interior, that is pleasantly lighted by the emblem on the processor cooler. Despite being liquid cooled, the system is amazingly loud, even with the case's multitude of fans running at their lowest speed. A dial on top of the front panel helps you to manually spin them at full speed do you have to would like some further cooling. it will definitely look conspicuous your lounge, however it's less over the highest than several diversion cases, despite its size.

There square measure four five 1/4in drive bays, one in all them occupied by a DVD-RW drive, and 2 drive cages with house for 3 drives in every. The vibration-damped three 1/2in drive rails slide in swimmingly, ANd one has been fitted with an adapter that holds a 120GB SSD boot drive. A 2TB three 1/2in disc occupies the bay below. 3 of the motherboard's six SATA3 ports square measure in use, departure 3 vacant for future upgrades.

The Black Legion’s processor is AN Intel Core i5-4670K processor, that is overclocked to four.4GHz and is fitted in an exceedingly GB Z87X-D3H motherboard. 2 of the four memory slots square measure occupied by 8GB modules of one,866MHz DDR3 RAM to produce a complete memory capability of 16GB. this could be enough memory for years to come back.

Unsurprisingly, the laptop created an exceptional score of 134 in our benchmark tests, and created a very robust multitasking score of a hundred and forty four. The graphics card is AN XFX AMD Radeon R7950 with 3GB of graphics memory, and it performed well in our tests, manufacturing average frame rates of thirty eight.6fps in Crysis a pair of and eighty eight.49fps in Dirt disagreement at immoderate quality and a resolution of one,920x1,080.

The motherboard has ample growth slots. though it's 3 PCI-E x16 slots, just one runs at x16, with the others running at x8 and x4. None of those slots share information measure, either, therefore once the x8 slot is inhabited the most x16 slot runs at x8, and once the x4 slot is inhabited none of the PCI-E x1 slots can work. that is a reasonably sensible reason to stay the x4 slot unpeopled, because the motherboard has 3 terribly handy PCI-E x1 slots.

One of these is blocked by the graphics cards, however that also leaves 2 offered for growth cards like a sound card or extra USB3 ports. The motherboard's solely PCI slot is occupied by a Wi-Fi card.

The case connectors square measure set on prime of the laptop, simply on top of the front panel. Here, aboard the fan speed adjustment dial, you will find four USB2 ports, a USB3 port and a FireWire port. The latter is not connected to something, though, because the motherboard does not have AN IEEE 1394 header. sadly, the front panel’s USB3 port was connected to a USB port on the rear panel via a pass-through cable. do you have to need a lot of USB ports, the motherboard has 2 free headers. In fact, it is a shame Vibox hasn't used 2 backplane USB3 adaptors to create the foremost of the headers. At present, the headers feel wasted.
At the rear of the system, the motherboard provides many property. additionally to the occupied USB3 port, there square measure another 5 USB3 and 2 USB2 ports. aboard these could be a PS/2 port for AN older mouse or keyboard, and there’s conjointly a Gigabit local area network port, do you have to wish to attach to your network via wire instead of Wi-Fi. handily, the Black Legion comes with a full annual version of Bullguard web Security. It's supported the BitDefender engine, that did well in our most up-to-date anti-virus cluster take a look at.

The Black Legion could be a extremely such, well-built and well-priced laptop, and is one in all the most effective diversion systems you'll obtain. do you have to wish one thing to a small degree a lot of discreet, you may obtain the pc Planet ND 5000, however otherwise there’s no reason to not invest within the Vibox Black Legion.