Product Reviews

With a title as long as that you'd hope for a lot from this PC, and indeed you do get quite a bit. It's part of CyberPower's Hi-Performance Gaming range, and while there may be two letters chopped off a word there, there's no shortage of stuff inside the dominating case to keep performance-hungry users satisfied.

At the heart of the system is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor. It's one of the new Core 2 Duos, with a faster front side bus (FSB) than models not ending in '50'. The FSB is the path along which data passes between the processor and the rest of the PC, so lots of speed here is reassuring, as is the speed of the processor itself, a hefty 2.66GHz. That's pretty near the top of the pile for Core 2 Duos, so you can't ask for much more in the processing department.

Of course, processing power is nothing without a decent supporting cast of other components, and here again the Xfire GT Pro delivers. There's 2GB of memory (RAM) to keep Vista Home Premium happy and let you run several applications at once without struggling. CyberPower has also squeezed extra performance from the two hard disks it's installed by combining them in a RAID array. RAID stands for 'redundant array of independent devices' (or 'inexpensive drives', according to which geek you ask). 'Redundant' doesn't mean the whole thing is pointless, but that if one device fails the whole system won't come down, an important consideration in the world of servers, where RAID comes from.

Disk doubler

Since ordinary users don't like paying twice for their storage just for an extra bit of reassurance, RAID has evolved to provide different flavours, with the option of using multiple disks to boost speed instead of reliability. Using one disk to back up the other would be a 'mirrored' array, or RAID 0. Another method actively uses two hard disks simultaneously, splitting disk reads and writes evenly between them in the hope that halving the workload for each disk will boost performance. This is a 'striped' array, or RAID 1; data is said to be striped across the disks. It usually gives a bit of a performance boost, but disks these days tend to be very fast anyway, especially if they're SATA 2-compatible. Any RAID array needs to be made from identical disks, and Windows will then see them as one storage device. So, even though this PC has two 250MB disks, you'll see one 500GB drive in Windows. We'd rather CyberPower had just used one disk, as the inherent danger with a striped RAID array, ironically, is that you double the chance of disk

ADVERTISEMENT

failure - and therefore data loss - for questionable performance gains.

How much RAID contributed to the high 2D benchmark score is hard to say, but it's easy to tell where the 3D performance comes from: the huge red graphics card that dominates the internals. It's an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, the flagship of ATI's new family of DirectX 10 cards. The specs are a gamer's dream, with 320 stream processors running at 740MHz and a huge 1GB of memory all of its own.

However, a game needs to be programmed to use that 1GB of video memory, and most just aren't. Besides, it's the stream processors that handle the calculations that make 3D games look gorgeous while still running smoothly. As such, it's interesting to compare how many calculations this card can do per second with a card at the top of rival nVidia's current family. You can see what we discovered below. To cut a long story short, gaming performance could have been better - but it's still very good.

The looks of this PC are certainly striking. The huge 220mm intake fan at the front is more than just aesthetic, as it sucks in plenty of air, crucial for a high-performance PC. However, it's blocked by the hard disk caddy behind it, so an equally massive side intake fan is needed as well, pushing air onto all the hot components and out the rear. WiFi capability is usefully built into the motherboard.

Sound decisions?

Slightly lost underneath that huge graphics card is a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio sound card. It's welcome and yet confusing. The card has the 24-bit Crystallizer and the surround sound wizardry that's helped the X-Fi gain its positive reputation. They combine to give MP3s and so forth a richer quality, with even poorly encoded tracks sounding cleaner. What's wrong with that? Well, the Extreme Audio doesn't do anything for gaming. There's no fancy EAX 5 support for surround sound game effects. And that's very odd indeed for a machine with 'Gamer' in its name. To add to our disappointment, the bundled 5.1 Creative Inspire T6100 speakers are too basic to do the X-Fi justice.

Given the mixed bag of internals, we were glad to find the supplied monitor was generally very good. As a physical object it wasn't too distracting, nor particularly flimsy or cheap-feeling. And the display was definitely on the good side of average, with a dark black and a bright, acceptably clean white. You can use the monitor at maximum brightness and dial up the contrast a couple of notches to get the best results, and once that's done you've got a screen that's bright and vibrant and displays colours accurately. It even handles shadowy areas of photos well, with a good level of detail and texture. Cheaper screens render shadows as blocks of black, as they simply can't distinguish between dark greys, and the results are very distracting. Not so here, making this panel a welcome addition to the system.

This flawed but interesting system is guaranteed for no less than three years, although through all of those the terms are return to base (RTB), so you'll have to send the machine back to its maker if you need warranty service.