Tested – Chillblast Zen and Overclockers Renda PC’s.

The interior is extremely neat, and there’s space to add four 2.5in drives and four 3.5in drives – ideal for storage, because this PC only includes a sole SSD. The chassis meanwhile features two USB ports and an SD card reader of its own, and Chillblast has added a couple of extra USB ports at the rear and a card reader behind the door at the front. That door is reversible, and the fan cover behind is easily removable for access and cleaning.

The Silencio looks smart, and it’s only 210mm wide and 408mm tall, so it doesn’t take up much space. The crucial component for photo editing, of course, is the CPU and the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 is deployed here. It’s a six-core chip with multi-threading, and it’s got base and boost speeds of 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz. The CPU is paired with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 GPU, an entry-level card with 4GB of memory.

The specification is rounded out by 16GB of 3,200MHz memory, a 512GB Intel 660p SSD and an Asus PRIME B550M-A motherboard. The board has WiFi 6, two spare memory slots and loads of USB ports, but it’s a micro-ATX product – so PCI expansion options are limited, and there’s no extra M.2 connector. There’s no USB Type-C or Thunderbolt on board either.

The Ryzen 5 3600 is a capable mid-range CPU. Its Geekbench 5 single- and multi-core scores of 1,250 and 7,022 are solid – barely slower than the Ryzen 7 3700X. Impressively, the Chillblast’s multi-core result actually beats Intel’s new Core i5-10600K, and you’d have to pay more than £1200 for that CPU inside a similarly-specified PC.