Aftershock Impulse Review

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅06-03-19
Closer Look: Internal


Delving inside for a closer look at the interior, we have to say that Aftershock could have done a better job with the cable management. Space within this chassis is tight, but it could be improved on.

Taking centre stage on the prominent side is the Intel reference heatsink/fan. We’re surprised to see this being used since a low-end thermal solution would be inexpensive to use and would undoubtedly reduce noise levels and improve temperatures.

The foundation of Impulse is based on the Intel Core i5-8600K, which is another strange choice for two reasons – Intel’s 9th Generation has been available since October (6 months ago) and the motherboard choice caps an unlocked CPU, prohibiting it from being overclocked anyway. Nevertheless, the CPU itself with its 6 cores and 6 threads is very capable for general usage and gaming. Aftershock’s motherboard of choice is the ASRock H310M-ITX/ac. This is a basic motherboard but still offers some excellent features even though it conforms to the Mini-ITX form factor. Dual band 802.11ac is available as well as Intel Gigabit LAN.

Matched to the CPU/mobo combo there is 16GB of ADATA 2666MHz DDR4. While this may appear as a ‘no frills’ kit, it still does the job and will be the ideal capacity and speed for a good blend of performance in and out of games. Memory

Powering the entire system we have an SFX power supply from FSP – the Dagger 600W. This unit may not be as widely available as other PSUs but its 80 Plus Gold certified, uses a double ball bearing fan and is modular. Based on the specifications, this model is ideal for the configuration.

Obtaining reliable frame-rates from the latgest gaming titles is no problem for Impulse. 3D performance is left in the very capable hands of the ZOTAC RTX 2070 MINI. This graphics card uses NVIDIA’s new Turing architecture and brings with it a whole host of exciting features like real-time ray tracing and DLSS.


In the storage arena, Aftershock has gone with a twin combo which is a traditional move by many system integrators nowadays. However, rather than utilise PCI-Express driven M.2 SSD storage, Impulse uses a 256GB Intel 545s SSD for its primary storage. This drive uses the SATA interface and is therefore capped at 500MB/s. For the secondary drive we have a 1TB Toshiba HDWL110 (again SATA-based) which will serve as the main storage drive for the games/music/movie library.

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