CyberPower Liquid Viper review

CyberPower is notably keen on water cooling: most of its enthusiast-level machines arrive with bespoke cooling systems built from XSPC kit, and the Liquid Viper is no different. A dual-bay reservoir occupies two 5.25in bays at the front of the case, and the spacious roof of the enclosure is filled by a 240mm radiator equipped with a pair of 120mm fans. Cooling pipes from the rear of the radiator snake between processor and reservoir, and the blue coolant matches the blue 120mm fan at the front of the machine.

The object of all this cooling is an Intel Core i7-3930K processor, overclocked from 3.2GHz all the way up to 4.75GHz. This is a hefty chip, with six Hyper-Threaded cores addressing a dozen concurrent threads; its 12MB L3 cache is slightly smaller than the 15MB of the i7-3960X, but at virtually half the price it’s a sensible choice.

Thanks to this powerful CPU, the Liquid Viper achieved an overall benchmark result of 1.28 in our tests, including a stonking multi-tasking score of 1.56. Even in our toughest test, that water-cooling kept the overclocked chip down to a chilled 67 degrees. That’s one of the lowest peak temperatures we’ve seen from an overclocked high-end CPU.

The system delivered a good turn of speed in our games tests too. Though Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 580 is soon to be superseded by a 28nm refresh, it’s still an extremely capable card. We saw 58fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test, and a comfortably playable 33fps even at 2,560 x 1,600 on a 30in panel. You won’t get much more graphical grunt than this without moving up to a dual-GPU rig such as the Chillblast Fusion Immortal. That system scored 94fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality benchmark, thanks to a pair of AMD Radeon HD 7970s – but at a total price of £2,098 inc VAT.

The Liquid Viper comes with a Blu-ray writer – a step up from the readers we’re used to seeing – and a generous sixteen gigabytes of DDR3 RAM. The Asus P9X79 PRO motherboard also offers an additional four DIMM slots for further expansion; and if you want to supplement the included 64GB Crucial M4 SSD and 1TB Seagate hard disk there are four sturdy hard disk bays at hand. There’s a trio of available PCI-Express x16 slots too (though all three will run at x8 speed, thanks to the graphics card already installed) and a single PCI-E x1 slot.