Digital Storm VIRTUE: Intel Haswell-Powered Gaming PC

Without dwelling too long or hard on the issue, the DS VIRTUE's Obsidian Series 350D is a solid but understated chassis. For what is essentially plain a black rectangle, the metal and plastic case does have a couple of nice features, most notably the huge, clear side panel window and brushed metal finish front panel. And it is built very well. There’s no fancy lighting of any kind though, and the only things that glow are the “Corsair” and “GeForce GTX” logos on the CPU cooler and GPU, respectively.


It’s rather like having a powerful sports car with a non-descript body; you miss out on that fun part of owning something with superb components and performance where people do double-takes when they see it. With that said, Corsair makes some of the best cases in the business. It's just uncommon for a boutique builder to put together such a powerful gaming system and not adorn it with some snazzy, eye-catching features.


That said, perhaps Digital Storm is going for that cool, dark, assassin look, because the interior looks the part. The ASUS board is covered with black “armor”, and the whole of the cooling system--including the cooler itself, the tubes, the radiator, and the fans--are all black. The front and rear case fans are black, too. Even the DIMM heatsinks and PSU are black.


The front panel houses the optical drive, as well as a pair of USB 3.0 ports, headphone and mic jacks, and power and reset buttons. Around back, the graphics card offers two DVI ports, HDMI, and DisplayPort, and the rear I/O adds another DVI port and HDMI port. The rest of the (neatly labelled) ports include four USB 2.0, four USB 3.0, SPDIF out, LAN, and six audio jacks.


There’s clearly not much to see on the Digital Storm VIRTUE’s desktop either, which is good; the company went with a simple black theme. They tweaked the stock Start screen to match by rolling with a simple black background with no embellishments.


And now, we’ll see how the system performs when the rubber meets the road...