Stormforce Gaming Onyx i3-13100F GTX 1650 Review | Budget Gaming PC Assessed

Buying a prebuilt is a transaction. You hand over money, you get a working PC. No sourcing parts, no compatibility nightmares, no three evenings watching tutorial videos about BIOS settings. The question isn't whether that convenience has value. It does. The question is whether the specific machine you're buying is worth what they're charging for it, or whether you're paying a fat convenience premium for components that were already cheap before they marked them up.

The Stormforce Gaming Onyx i3-13100F GTX 1650 sits at the budget end of the prebuilt market. That means it needs to be honest about what it is. Not a gaming powerhouse. Not a content creation workstation. A sensible, affordable entry point that gets Windows 11 running on your desk without requiring you to know what DDR4 timings are. Whether it pulls that off depends on the parts inside, and that's exactly what we're going to dig into.

This is a spec-sheet and component-knowledge review. We haven't had a unit on a bench. What we have done is pull apart every spec Stormforce Gaming lists, cross-reference it against what those components actually do in the real world, and compare the whole package against what you'd spend building something similar yourself. If you're searching for an Onyx i3-13100F GTX 1650 review, you're in the right place.

On paper, that's a coherent budget build. The i3-13100F is a quad-core chip with hyperthreading, so you get eight threads to work with. The GTX 1650 is NVIDIA's entry-level discrete GPU. The 16GB of DDR4 is genuinely decent for this price tier. And 1TB of NVMe storage is better than you'd have got in a budget prebuilt a couple of years ago when 256GB SSDs were still common in this bracket. So far, so reasonable.

Where you start to feel the budget constraints is the 350W PSU and the H610 motherboard. Neither is a disaster, but both put a ceiling on what this machine can become if you decide to upgrade it later. The H610 chipset doesn't support overclocking (not that the i3-13100F is unlocked anyway), and 350W is tight if you ever want to swap in a more power-hungry GPU. More on that in the upgrade section. For now, here's the full spec breakdown.

What does the i3-13100F actually mean for day-to-day use? For web browsing, office work, video streaming, and light content creation, it's genuinely comfortable. Eight threads handle multitasking well enough that you won't be sitting watching a spinner every time you switch between a browser with fifteen tabs and a spreadsheet. For gaming, the CPU is rarely the bottleneck at 1080p with a GTX 1650, because the GPU will hit its limit first. That's almost a compliment, in a roundabout way. The processor won't hold the graphics card back.

Where the i3-13100F shows its limits is in CPU-heavy workloads. Video encoding, 3D rendering, streaming while gaming, heavy compilation work. These tasks want more cores, and a quad-core chip, even a fast one, starts to feel it under sustained load. If you're buying this for general gaming and everyday computing, the CPU is absolutely adequate. If you're planning to stream your gameplay at the same time, you might find it a bit of a squeeze. Intel's own specification page confirms the 12MB L3 cache, which helps with gaming frame consistency more than raw clock speed would suggest.

Think about what that looks like practically. Older and less demanding titles, things like Fortnite, Rocket League, Minecraft, CS2 on lower settings, older Call of Duty titles, indie games, will run perfectly well. You'll get playable frame rates and a genuinely enjoyable experience. Step into more demanding modern releases, open-world games with dense environments, newer AAA titles pushing cutting-edge rendering, and you'll need to drop settings to medium or even low to stay smooth. That's the honest reality of a GTX 1650 in 2025.

Ray tracing is largely off the table. The GTX 1650 doesn't have dedicated RT cores in the same way RTX cards do, so enabling ray tracing in games that support it will crater performance to unplayable levels. That's not a knock on this specific machine. It's just the nature of the GPU tier. If ray tracing matters to you, you need to be looking at an RTX 3060 or above, which means a different budget entirely. What the GTX 1650 does offer is reasonable 1080p gaming for a wide range of titles without demanding a huge amount of power, which is part of why it can survive in a system with a 350W PSU.

The H610 motherboard is worth a mention here. The LGA 1700 platform on H610 supports DDR4, and the board will almost certainly have two DIMM slots. If 16GB is currently installed as a single stick (which is possible at this price point), you'd want to add a matching stick to enable dual-channel mode, which makes a meaningful difference to memory bandwidth. If it's already two 8GB sticks running in dual-channel, you're sorted. Stormforce Gaming doesn't specify the channel configuration in the verified data, so it's worth checking when you receive the machine.

The 1TB NVMe SSD is a proper highlight. NVMe storage is significantly faster than the old SATA SSDs that used to dominate budget prebuilts, and it makes a real difference to boot times, application loading, and game load screens. Windows 11 boots quickly from NVMe, and 1TB gives you room to install a decent library of games without immediately running out of space. That's more than you'd get from a lot of competitors at this price tier. No spinning hard drive to contend with either, which is a relief. HDDs in prebuilts always felt like a false economy.

The Coolermaster MB320L case is the thermal wild card here. Coolermaster's MB320L is a micro-ATX chassis with mesh panelling on the front, which is a positive sign for airflow. Mesh fronts allow air to actually reach the intake fans rather than being strangled by a solid panel. How many case fans Stormforce Gaming includes in the build isn't specified in the verified data, but the case itself supports up to three 120mm fans, so there's room to add cooling if you want it down the line.

For the typical workload this machine is aimed at, light to moderate gaming, web browsing, office work, the cooling setup should be adequate. The GTX 1650 is a low-power GPU that doesn't generate enormous heat, and the i3-13100F isn't a furnace. Where you'd start to notice thermal management more is if you pushed both components hard simultaneously for extended periods. That's not a scenario this machine is really designed for, but it's worth being aware of if you're planning intensive sessions.

Build quality in prebuilts at this price point is always a compromise. You're not getting the fit and finish of a premium boutique build. Panels might have slightly more flex than you'd like, and the internal finishing won't be what you'd see in a case costing twice as much. But Coolermaster's budget cases tend to be functional and reasonably solid rather than genuinely flimsy. The MB320L has a decent reputation as a value chassis that doesn't embarrass itself.

Cable management inside a prebuilt is often where things get ugly. Budget builds sometimes have cables routed wherever they fit rather than wherever they should go, which can restrict airflow and just looks a mess if you open the side panel. Stormforce Gaming doesn't publish build photos showing internal cable routing, so we can't tell you definitively how tidy this one is. What we can say is that the MB320L has cable routing channels and tie-down points that make a clean build achievable, so if the assembler bothered to use them, it should look reasonable.

The Coolermaster MB320L case has a front panel I/O, which on this chassis typically includes USB-A ports and a headphone/microphone combo jack. That's useful for plugging in peripherals without reaching around to the back of the machine every time. Again, for the exact front panel spec, the Stormforce Gaming product listing is your authoritative source.

Networking on H610 boards is usually handled by a wired Ethernet port on the rear I/O. Whether this build includes a Wi-Fi card isn't specified in the verified data, so if wireless connectivity matters to you, it's worth confirming with Stormforce Gaming directly before purchasing. A budget prebuilt at this price point may or may not include a Wi-Fi adapter, and that's the kind of detail that genuinely matters if your desk isn't near a router. Wired Ethernet is always preferable for gaming anyway, lower latency and more stable, but the option to go wireless is worth knowing about.

Stormforce Gaming doesn't specify what additional software they install beyond the operating system. Some prebuilt manufacturers load machines with third-party bloatware, trial software, and branded utilities that serve the manufacturer more than the user. Others ship relatively clean installs. Without specific information from the verified data about what Stormforce Gaming includes, we can't tell you definitively. What we can say is that any unwanted software on a Windows 11 machine is removable, and a clean-up takes maybe twenty minutes if you know what you're doing.

Windows 11 itself has its own quirks. The interface changes from Windows 10 are still dividing opinion, and some users find the Start menu redesign annoying. But for gaming, Windows 11 includes DirectStorage support (relevant for compatible games and NVMe drives), Auto HDR, and generally good driver support across the board. If you're coming from Windows 10, the adjustment period is real but short. And since this machine ships with it pre-installed and activated, there's no cost argument for preferring Windows 10 here.

The H610 motherboard is the other limiting factor. H610 is Intel's entry-level chipset for the 13th gen platform. It supports the i3-13100F fine, but it doesn't support overclocking, and it has limited PCIe lanes compared to higher-end chipsets. You do get the benefit of being on the LGA 1700 socket, which is compatible with Intel's 12th and 13th gen processors, so a CPU upgrade within that family is theoretically possible. Going from an i3-13100F to an i5-13600K, for example, would require a BIOS update and ideally a better cooler, but the socket compatibility is there.

RAM upgrades are straightforward. DDR4 is widely available and cheap. If the machine ships with a single 16GB stick, adding a second matching stick for dual-channel operation is an easy and relatively inexpensive improvement. The H610 board will have a second DIMM slot available. Storage is similarly expandable. The H610 platform supports at least one M.2 slot, and there may be SATA ports available for additional drives. The 1TB NVMe is a solid starting point, but if you're a heavy game installer, you'll want more storage eventually, and adding it shouldn't be complicated.

Against other prebuilts, the 16GB of RAM and the 1TB NVMe SSD are genuine differentiators. Plenty of budget prebuilts at this price point still ship with 8GB of RAM and either a smaller SSD or a hybrid HDD/SSD setup. Stormforce Gaming's decision to include proper storage and adequate memory is a sensible one that improves the out-of-box experience. The 3-year collect, repair and return warranty is also worth calling out. That's a proper warranty, not a one-year limited affair, and it covers parts and labour. For a budget machine, that's reassuring.

Where the Onyx falls short of more expensive prebuilts is obvious. A machine with an RTX 3060 will run modern games dramatically better. A machine with an i5 or i7 will handle CPU-heavy workloads more comfortably. But those machines cost significantly more. The Onyx isn't trying to be those machines. It's trying to be a functional, warranted, Windows 11 gaming PC that doesn't require you to know anything about PC building. On those terms, it's a reasonable offer.

The compromises are real and worth being clear about. The 350W PSU limits your upgrade path significantly. The H610 motherboard is a budget chipset. The GTX 1650 is a 2019 GPU that's showing its age in demanding modern titles. If you want to play the latest AAA games at high settings and high frame rates, this machine will frustrate you. If you want to play Rocket League, Fortnite, older Call of Duty titles, indie games, and a wide range of less demanding titles, while also having a perfectly functional everyday Windows 11 PC for work and browsing, this machine will serve you well.

The 3-year collect, repair and return warranty covering all parts and labour is genuinely good. That's Stormforce Gaming standing behind their product in a meaningful way, and for a budget machine where you might worry about longevity, it's reassuring. Free fast UK delivery is a nice touch too. So who should buy this? Someone who wants to get into PC gaming without spending a fortune, who doesn't want to build their own machine, and who has realistic expectations about what a budget GPU can do. Who should skip it? Anyone who wants to play the latest demanding games at proper settings, or who plans to upgrade the GPU soon and doesn't want to replace the PSU at the same time. For the right buyer, at the current price of £479.99, this is a reasonable deal.