PREMESSA

Questa recensione mi è stata chiesta da Shinobee in seguito alla mia valutazione postata su Amazon e a una e-mail inviata da me evidenziante alcuni problemi del computer. Mi sono dunque focalizzato principalmente sugli aspetti positivi e negativi del desktop.

RECENSIONE (English)

This PC reflects its price. While it's overly advertised as an amazing PC, it looks like Shinobee went for making the pc look good in the apparent specs rather than be actually as good as advertised. Let's see the pros first.
Pros:

• Graphics card is quite good, and can run modern games at decent graphics and good speed.
• 16 Gb of RAM are double the usual amount found in similarly priced PCs
• The case is of good quality.

Cons:

• The processor is very old, and a DDR3 model. Furthermore, its base clock is 4 GHz; it’s only its boost clock that reaches 4.2 GHz.. Also, it's not "8 cores", it's 4 cores, 8 threads, 8 LOGICAL cores. It'll perform less than a 2012 6-core processor. The TDP is also quite high (the Ryzen 9 3900X, an AMD high-end product, has a TDP of 105, 20 less than the FX 8350).
• The motherboard is very old and lousy. It's very slow, and only supports old AM3 DDR3 AMD CPUs and very slow DDR3 RAMs (1000-1666 MHz). It also heats up very easily.
• The RAM is a DDR3 model, so it's quite slow even if it's a 16GB. It’s also not the max speed possible with DDR3 RAMs.
• HDD's size is 1800 GB, not precisely 2 TB and not 2800 GB as listed in the specs at Amazon page.
• The HDD is 5400 RPM, slower than most HDDs at 7200 RPM.
• SSD doesn’t have NAND flash, so it’s slower than almost any kind of SSD.
• PSU (Power Supply Unit) isn’t great, overheats and can cause emergency shutdown. Thankfully Amazon provided me with a partial refund; I went for a Corsair 550W PSU, at around 50 dollars.
• WiFi adapter max speed and range is dismaying.    
• The motherboard is not mounted correctly, so some ports on the back are not easily accessible.
• According to PCPartPicker, the PC is overall slower than it should be.

Now for a few specs:
Minecraft runs between 120 and 400 fps, quite smoothly, and the heaviest shader (Continuum 2.0.2) with max settings runs at 15/20 fps.
Nintendo 3DS emulations run between 70% and 125% of the intended speed.
Other information about the PC:
- Before plugging the PC to the power socket, it’s best to check that the switch at the back is correctly set. From the Amazon reviews, it looks like many people had the switch set to the wrong option, so it’s not clear enough in instructions and warnings.
- If the PC crashes, due to the motherboard’s bios there are two options: F1, to factory reset Bios settings (this will sometimes cause the system to no longer boot unless settings are fixed), and F2, the least intuitive option, that will safely boot the PC after exiting the BIOS tool to fix problems. (Reboots and crashes are often caused by the PSU, as written above.)
- The driver and audio card may have problems with headphones with microphone (ports are either Output or Input, not both).
So, to recap it all, it's about the best PC obtainable for this price. To have the best experience, both PSU and WiFi card have to be replaced (I didn’t replace the latter due to using tethered connection), also the PC isn’t really upgradeable (upgrading the GPU would cause a bottleneck, and changing processor/motherboard/RAM wouldn’t be possible without changing all three of these options).