Cryo Nano

Details:
Price: £995

Verdict:
Probably the only PC on the market that succeeds in giving LAN party-goers exactly what they’re looking for. 8/10

CPU: Intel C2D E8500 (@4GHz)
RAM: 4GB Corsair PC2-8500
GRAPHICS: Nvidia GTX 260+ (216 SPs)
POWER SUPPLY: 520W Corsair PSU
HDD: 500GB Seagate SATA II
OPTICAL DRIVE: DVD-RW (22x)
CASE: Lian-Li V351 case

LAN parties aren’t just about getting together with some mates to play games – there’s much more at stake than being caught camping outside a spawn point. Attending a LAN is more akin to attending a car club meet – it’s not about the driving, its about the machines that do the driving. Making sure your PC is lovingly tricked-out with a hot chassis as well as a cutting-edge graphics card is of utmost importance, and its something CryoPC clearly recognises with the Nano. The Lian-Li V351 case is the SFF case du jour, not just because its manufacturer is widely regarded as one of best case-makers in the world, but because it’s as utilitarian as it is utterly stunning to look at.

While it’s a considerably smaller form factor than even a midi-tower case, the Nano is actually somewhat bigger than the nearest ‘standardised’ SFF chassis from Shuttle. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first and most obvious is that Shuttle designs and makes its own proprietary motherboards and SFF barebone PCs – the motherboard and power supplies in the systems are much smaller than those you’d find in standard Micro-ATX motherboards and systems. This leads neatly onto the second reason – the Cryo Nano uses no proprietary hardware. It’s all 100 per cent standard kit. Even the power supply is full-size, meaning you can upgrade the Nano with the minimum of fuss and expense, which certainly isn’t the case where Shuttle and its contemporaries are concerned.

So what’s inside? The backbone is an LGA775 Intel G45 chipset with a Core 2 Duo E8500 overclocked from three to four GHz. Corsair supplies 4GHz of dual-channel PC2-8500 (1066MHz) memory alongside, and Nvidia’s GTX260+ Core216 takes care of graphics. The rig is rounded off with a single-platter areal density Seagate 500GB drive, a 22x DVD-RW and the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista Home Premium.

As you can see from the gaming benchmarks, the Nano is more than capable of standing up to current i7 systems that cost up to 20 per cent more at retail. This is largely thanks to the massive 1GHz overclock on the E8500, which ensures the GTX260+ is entirely bottleneck-free. Our GTA IV test went completely without a hitch – in fact, it’s one of the best performances we’ve seen in recent issues, only being out-gunned to the tune of 7FPS by Chilblast’s Fusion Vulcan (Core i7 @ 3.8GHz, 6GB RAM, Nvidia GTX285), the eventual winner of our £1,200 Core i7 group test from issue 17. The only clear weak point of the Nano is where CPU-intensive processing is concerned, but if that’s massively important to you then there’s upgrade and build options that go right up through the Core i7’s ranks.

Ultimately, if portable performance is your thing, or you want to wow your LAN mates at the next get-together, then we can’t think of anything else we’d recommend.

Russell Barnes