Cyberpower Gamer Infinity 775 Silent Edition review

Anyone who's had a fan-cooled monster purring away in the corner of an otherwise quiet room understands the appeal of a passively-cooled PC. The Gamer Infinity has a 3.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 at its heart, but for once the processor isn't the star.

Instead, the attached cooler attracts the eye. The Thermalright Ultra 120 is a nickel-plated beast of a cooler, standing six inches proud of the motherboard. Eight nickel-plated copper heatpipes ferry heat away from the processor and into a giant aluminium radiator, whose huge surface area provides cooling.

It's a similar story for the Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT, which occupies the space of two PCI slots courtesy of a chunky cooler. Even the 500GB hard disk has a large heatsink attached to its underside.

The unusual cooling arrangement doesn't mean the Gamer Infinity lacks power. In our benchmarks it scored 1.69 overall. It isn't a result that threatens top-end Core i7 PCs such as the Chillblast Fusion Spitfire ' its result of 2.28, but it's still respectable. The graphics card is up to the job as well, returning a decent score of 54fps in Crysis at our middle, 1,280 x 1,024 setting.

Unfortunately, the huge heatsinks on the graphics card and processor are somewhat wasted, as the Gamer Infinity includes a pair of 120mm fans, one at the front and one at the back, both blowing warm air out of the system. The result is a quiet hum which, compared to the air-cooled PC Specialist Fusion, is barely noticeable.

It would be a better use of the passive cooling, though, if Cyberpower had made the entire system silent. Cyberpower has attempted to keep a lid on the problem by attaching a large amount of acoustic foam to the floor and walls of the case.

Part of the Gamer Infinity's cooling niggles come from Cyberpower's choice of case. The PC Specialist Fusion has a mesh on its front cover that eases air flow; the Cyberpower's frontage is a solid slab of cheap-feeling plastic. Not only is it a disappointment to see such an obvious sacrifice to economy on an expensive PC, but it means the only duct for warm air on the front of the system is a small, 95mm-high mesh panel that doesn't even cover the entirety of the front fan.

On the plus side the case has plenty of space: three 5.25in external bays, two 3.5in external bays and another four internal 3.5in bays means you'll almost always have enough room to add another hard disk. Four spare SATA ports on the motherboard are another welcome sight.

There's upgrade potential elsewhere as well. The Infinity Gamer comes with 4GB of RAM (with appropriate flashy blue heatsinks), but there are still two DDR2 slots free for an upgrade. There are also three free PCI slots, and a PCI-Express 1x slot as well.

There's no possibility of a multi graphics card upgrade here: even if the passive cooler didn't make the 9600 GT double-height, there's no secondary PCI-Express x16 slot. It's a shame, as the system would be more than capable of supporting a top-end graphics card: the power supply can deliver up to 500W.

Unusually, Cyberpower has opted for a Creative Labs X-fi sound card, which occupies a PCI slot. A rather anachronistic couple of inclusions are the parallel and serial ports on the back, which join four USB ports, complemented by two more on the side.