Product Reviews

£999 is supposed to be the 'sweet spot' for PCs. You can pay less for a usable desktop, or pay more for top-end power, but a grand, says the conventional wisdom, will buy a sensible do-it-all system.

Well, that sweet spot seems to have drifted south. The Cyberpower is one of a few recent PCs that leaves little or nothing for most users to desire, yet does leave change from £900. Two months ago we tested the £899 Eclipse from PC Specialist (search for 139851) and found it a strong all-rounder. A lot can happen in two months, so when this system arrived from Cyberpower with the same price tag, we allowed ourselves to hope for even better.

Like most PC companies whose names don't end with 'pple', Cyberpower builds its systems in cases from other makers, in this instance a Cooler Master 690. Four big fans keep everything chilled, and the drive bays are screwless, so to add extra hard disks you just slide them in and plug in their cables. The fans do make some noise, and also set the case humming, which we found a little grating. This won't be too much of a concern if you'll be tucking the PC away under your desk. Then again, the fans also glow bright blue, which, seen through the black mesh front, is worth leaving on view.

The Gamer Infinity has the same main processor as PC Specialist's Eclipse, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750. It's great value as a 2.66MHz chip, but Cyberpower have overclocked it to a heady 3GHz, giving the Gamer Infinity

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the edge in our general (2D) tests, helped along by 2GB of gold-painted RAM from high-performance specialists OCZ.

nVidia's new mid-range graphics card, the 512MB 8800 GT, is a natural choice, offering better performance than the 360MB GTS seen recently in other mid-priced PCs. In our Call of Duty 2 gaming test, it didn't give us quite such stunning results as the same card in a cheaper Zoostorm system that we saw last month (we're still checking whether that may be due to a testing anomaly), but at 76 frames per second it was more than decent, showing it would cope fine with most current and upcoming titles. But the 8800's biggest advantage is its low price, so we looked to see the money saved being spent on other bits.

Image conscious

The 500GB Samsung hard disk is certainly generous, and you also get a quality wireless mouse and keyboard, good for both prolonged typing and fast-paced gaming. Importantly, the monitor is also a winner. The colours on the Acer AL2216W are perhaps a little flat compared with top-of-the-range screens, and at high brightness some detail can get washed out, but this 22 inch widescreen provides a large and engaging image for films and games, even if it's not the best for design work.

The sound card is a Creative X-Fi, but not one of the nice models with EAX 5 audio for games; it's the basic Xtreme Audio, with an older sound chip, which relies on software for the X-Fi features. That leaves the PC's processor spending more time on sound and less on smooth gameplay. So it's better than standard built-in audio, but only just. The Creative Inspire T7900 speakers, a decent 7.1 surround sound set, thus have less to show off than they might, but do go quite loud.

This slightly takes the edge off an otherwise very impressive PC. The overclocked processor delivers performance to beat pricier systems, while the graphics card is good enough to do full justice to current games. Serious gamers would need to spend more for top performance, and if you're not interested in games at all there are more appropriate systems, but the Cyberpower effectively covers both work and play.