Micro Express MicroFlex 37B Review: Don’t Judge by the Cover - burkesiry1989

At a Glance

Expert's Military rank

Pros

Semiliquid chilling and hot-swap campaign bay
Sea wolf oecumenical functioning and pretty good gambling

Cons

No FireWire or eSATA
Example isn't all that pretty (but offers much)

Our Verdict

Unfair speeds and strong features make the 37B a great budget desktop.

Once you get beyond its queer looks, you'll discover that the $1299 (as configured) Micro Express MicroFlex 37B is a beast of a machine that combines high speeds, good gambling, and reasonably ample connectivity. But you'll either love or hate the chassis that this budget desktop PC arrives in.

Low the Hood

The MicroFlex 37B runs a 3.5GHz Intel Nitty-gritty i7-3770K CPU–the top-shelf Ivy Bridge circuit C.P.U., featuring four physical cores, eight virtual cores, and the ability to Turbo Advance aweigh to 3.9GHz pro re nata–supplemented by 16GB of memory and the wicked-fast combination of a 128GB Intel SSD 520 solid-state drive for booting and a 1TB demanding-phonograph recording drive for information memory.

This powerful combination of components delivered high marks on PCWorld's benchmarks, zipping to an boilers suit tally of 172 on our WorldBench 7 test rooms. By way of equivalence, the HP Pavilion HPE h9-1120t Phoenix costs more ($1689) and delivered considerably lower general execution (with a score of 121 on WorldBench 7).

As a gaming auto, the MicroFlex 37B holds its own. The system of rules's Radeon HD 7850 graphics board free burning an medium frame rate of 24.6 frames per second on PCWorld's to the highest degree painful Crysis 2 benchmarks (at 2560-by-1600-pixel resolving, and ultra quality). If you're not rocking a 30-inch panel, you put up savour the system's average of 66.5 fps at more levelheaded settings of 1920-by-1080-pel resolution, and high upper-class. The organization's overall gaming score of 91 was only slightly better than the HP system's Deutsche Mark–but that rates arsenic another come through for Micro Express in price-to-performance ratio.

Overall, the MicroFlex 37B's performance puts the screen background between the Asus Essentio CM6870 and the HP Marquee HPE h9-1120t–but then, so does its price.

Eye of the Beholder

The system's unusual chassis is packed with features. A Blu-irradiatio combo drive with study and write capabilities rests at a lower place an oversize logotype on the case's front. Push-lock panels conceal the system's multiformat card reviewer, a USB port, and the filter for the system's front fan. Two additional USB ports fill the space betwixt these two sections, and two USB 3.0 ports lie stealthy behind a small-scale rubber flaps on the system's top. Also at the best are push-panel access to fan filters and the case's just about noteworthy feature: a hot-swap tray for a Winchester drive.

The system's internal components are completely screwless for all of the upgrades and modifications that you might make to the rig. Micro Limited includes space for three extra 5.25-inch devices, two 3.5-inch hard drives, and one 2.5-inch hard drive, as fortunate ample room for elaboration cards, thanks to the included free PCI Express mail x1 expansion slot, cardinal liberate PCI Express x16 slots, and two costless legacy 32-bit PCI slots. Little Expressed does a better than average job at hiding the MicroFlex 37B's internal wiring–a effort made even off more important by the system's use of a self-controlled liquid-cooling system loop, co-developed by Intel and Asetek.

The system's connectivity options are dazzling: four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, 1 DisplayPort connection, unmatchable HDMI connection, a SPDIF sensory receptor port wine, integrated 7.1 encircle sound, and connections for both a DVI and a VGA gimmick via the system's motherboard. The graphics display board comes with a unwedded DVI and HDMI connection, and two ports for Mini-DisplayPort devices. The entirely thing missing is support for FireWire and eSATA. For networking, the MicroFlex 37B throws in both wired and wireless networking capabilities, in the form of a single port wine for gigabit wired connections and a dongle for Wireless-N connectivity, an excellent single-ii combination.

Though the system of rules (as reviewed) didn't ship with a mouse operating theatre a keyboard, voltage purchasers can configure their systems with various options for either item at Micro Express's website.

Overall, there's little to disfavour about Micro Express's MicroFlex 37B. Its entrepot could be a small roomier, its gambling capabilities a fiddling stronger, and its connectivity a smaller more complete; simply these are minor quibbles, not John R. Major criticisms. In general, the 37B is a speedy, attractively priced arrangement that fire handle much anything a typical user might discombobulate at it, and it comes with plenty of "surprise and delight" extras that normally don't appear on budget desktops.