Why You Can Trust CNET Digital Storm Bolt review: A Bolt of no-frills lightning
The small-chassis Digital Storm Bolt gaming desktop will run any game on the market. You might even be able to afford it.
Editors' Note: Due to a publishing error, this review was posted before final proofreading, listing incorrect configuration information, including the wrong graphics card. This information has since been corrected.
Digital Storm Bolt
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Digital Storm Bolt joins a growing trend of small, microtower gaming-PC designs. For $1,599, this fixed-configuration desktop offers enough horsepower to run today's most demanding PC games with high resolutions and image quality, but without encumbering you or your desk area with a monolithic tower. As usual, the limits for this kind of system mean you can't add a second graphics card, hamstringing high-resolution play on multiple monitors. For all but that niche, the Bolt will be an excellent gaming PC, and it offers great value in its compact class.
The Bolt conforms to the microtower school of small case design. This puts it in line with the Falcon Northwest Tiki and the Alienware X51, both of which I reviewed last year. Of the three, Digital Storm's system has the most conservative design, with no alien heads or polished granite base plates in sight. The only real flourish is an unobtrusive pair of matte-black plastic fins that jut out along the rear side edges to prevent tipping.
Measuring approximately 14 inches tall by 5.5 inches wide by 15 inches deep, the Bolt also mirrors those systems in that it can accommodate just a single graphics card. And like the Falcon Northwest Tiki, it can support up to three hard drives, in this case one 3.5-inch drive and two 2.5-inchers.
My one gripe about the design of the Bolt comes down to its removable outer shell. The compact design leaves little clearance between the cables, tie-downs, screws, and other internal bits and the removal path for the cover. Every time I took the cover off or replaced it, it caught on something. You won't remove it every day, but expect a hassle when you do, and proceed gently.
| Digital Storm Bolt | Falcon Northwest Tiki | Origin Chronos | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price (at time of review) | $1,599 | $2,793 | $1,199 |
| Motherboard chipset | Intel Z77 | Intel H | Intel Z68 |
| CPU | 4.1GHz Intel Core i7-3770K (overclocked) | 4.3GHz Intel Core i7-3770K | 4.7GHz Intel Core i5-2550K (overclocked) |
| Memory | 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 8GB 1,866MHz DDR3 SDRAM | 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM |
| Graphics | 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 660 Ti | 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 | 1.28GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 560Ti |
| Hard drives | 120GB SSD, 500GB 7,200rpm mechanical | 256GB SSD, 2TB 5,400rpm mechanical | 750GB, 7,200rpm mechanical |
| Optical drive | dual-layer DVD burner | Blu-ray/dual-layer DVD burner | dual-layer DVD burner |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) | Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit) |
Digital Storm seems to have configured the Bolt to undercut the Falcon Northwest Tiki. In terms of core features, the Bolt and the Tiki are similar. Each has an overclocked Core i7-3770K CPU and a higher-end Nvidia graphics card. The Falcon's GTX 680 is more powerful than the GTX 660 Ti in the Bolt, but as we found in both benchmark and anecdotal testing, the Bolt is still a worthy gaming machine. You will also see how the small differences like an extra megahertz or two in CPU clock speed and faster memory pay off for the Tiki in our application performance tests. The Tiki also has a Blu-ray drive and more than four times the Bolt's hard-drive capacity.
Are those things worth the extra $1,000 for the Tiki configured above (and yes, the price is the same today as it was at the time of my review eight months ago)? The graphics card might be, but overall it's a tough call. If all you care about is gaming performance for the dollar, Digital Storm has an extremely compelling deal in the $1,599 Bolt.
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Shorter bars indicate better performance)
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 | Rendering multiple CPUs | | Rendering single CPU |
The Bolt offers few surprises in its application performance given its modest overclock settings. Compared with the other PCs, which hit clock speeds of 4.7GHz and higher with the same Core i7-3770K chip, the Digital Storm Bolt and its 4.1GHz setting posts slower but still healthy results. I see no warning signs in these scores, and as expected, the Bolt beats the stock-speed (and $1,999) Dell XPS 8500 on almost every test.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 1,600x1,200 (high, 4x aa) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 1,920x1,200 (DirectX 10, 4x aa, very high) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| 2,560x1,600 (DirectX 11, very high) | | 1,920x1,080 (DirectX 11, very high) |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| Extreme (1,920x1,080) | | Performance (1,920x1,080, 16x AF) | | Entry Level (1,680x1,050) |
Our gaming tests rely on older games due to the fact that they offer automated benchmarking, as opposed to using imperfect, manual tools like Fraps. Few people play Far Cry 2 anymore, but it still provides a useful relative comparison. Irrational Games' forthcoming BioShock Infinite is said to include a built-in benchmark mode, and I'm eager to try it out for testing when that game is available.
For the results we do have, the Bolt again lands where I expected given its configuration. The boosted "Ti" version of the GeForce GTX 660 card likely helps add a few frames per second, and in general you can play any game available on this PC with high resolution and image quality.
To supplement our older gaming tests, I also played Crysis 3 and Far Cry 3 on the Bolt, using a 30-inch display at 2,560x1,440 pixels and maxed-out image quality. Both games played without a stutter. You might hit the ceiling for this PC's gaming capability before a full-tower, dual-card system like Digital Storm's ODE V2 Level 4's, but compared with the Falcon Northwest Tiki, the $1,000 premium for that system over the Bolt simply doesn't show up too dramatically on our benchmark tests.
You should have no trouble finding a port on the Bolt for the devices that will matter to gamers. With four USB 3.0 and six USB 2.0 jacks, 7.1-channel and S/PDIF audio outputs, and HDMI, DisplayPort, and two DVI video outputs on the graphics card, you can connect almost any headset, TV, monitor, speaker, audio receiver, or input device. That puts the Bolt on solid footing if you want to use it as a traditional deskbound computer, or in the living room connected to your home entertainment hardware.
Finally, as stated earlier, the smaller case implies a limited upgrade path. This configuration comes with two hard drives, one mechanical, one solid-state, and you have room to add a second 2.5-inch drive to go with them post-purchase. Digital Storm also placed the power and data cables conveniently near the free drive bay. You get no other room to upgrade this system, though. The two memory card slots are both occupied, and the double-wide graphics card sits in the single PCI Express port.
Conclusion
You can see where Digital Storm pulled back on the $1,599 Bolt to keep the price reasonable. It has a standard DVD drive instead of Blu-ray. The storage hard drive is a slower 5,400rpm model instead of the 7,200rpm standard. The conservative overclock settings mean Digital Storm doesn't need a liquid CPU cooler like the Falcon Northwest Tiki, and can instead rely on a traditional fan-and-heatsink combination.
If you want a luxury small-form-factor gaming PC, the Tiki, Maingear's Potenza, or perhaps a version of the Origin Chronos will be a better, though more expensive, fit. By focusing on core performance and value, the Digital Storm Bolt makes high-end gaming accessible to a wider audience.
Performance testing conducted by Joseph Kaminski. Find out more about how we test desktop systems.
System configurations
Digital Storm ODE V2 Level 4
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 4.7GHz Intel Core i7-3770K; 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; (2) 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 670 graphics card; 128GB Corsair SSD, 1TB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive
Falcon Northwest Tiki
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit; 4.3GHz Intel Core i7-377K (overclocked); 8GB 1,866MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards; 256GB SSD; 2TB 5,400rpm Western Digital hard drive
Maingear Potenza Super Stock
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 4.7GHz Intel Core i7-3770K (overclocked); 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 2GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics card; 30GB solid-state caching drive; 1TB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive
Origin Chronos
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 4.69GHz Intel Core i5-2550K; 8GB 1,333MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 1.28GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 560 Ti graphics card; 750GB 7,200rpm hard drive
Digital Storm Bolt
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 4.1GHz Intel Core i7-3770K; 8GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 660 Ti graphics card; 120GB solid-state drive, 500GB 5,400rpm hard drive
Dell XPS 8500
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit; 3.4GHz Intel Core i7-3770; 16GB 1,600MHz DDR3 SDRAM; 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7870 graphics card; 256MB 3TB 7,200rpm Seagate hard drive