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Arbico has made a big effort to cool the overclocked Core i5-3570K inside its Elite 3575 CS, and has used no fewer than five 120mm fans throughout the midi-tower case. With a solid-state boot disk and dedicated Nvidia graphics, it’s certainly no slouch.
The Elite 3575 CS’s front panel is built entirely from wire mesh, and there are two 120mm fan mounts on the roof and side panel respectively. Front panel I/O is positioned at the top of the case, and provides two USB ports and two 3.5mm audio jacks, one for a microphone and the other for a pair of headphones. Below it is an optical DVD drive, followed by another two empty 5.25in drive bays and a single external 3.5in bay.
Most connectivity is located around the back, on the Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard backing plate. Four USB ports, two faster USB3s, one PS/2 port and Gigabit Ethernet are all present and correct, as are three 3.5mm audio jacks and a single digital optical output. If you want to use the integrated GPU, there are DVI, VGA and HDMI outputs, although the Nvidia GeForce 550Ti is significantly quicker.
Popping off the side panel reveals a fairly spacious interior that’s dominated by the massive Xigmatec CPU cooler. It’s a tower-style design with 120mm fans at both ends, which creates a push-pull configuration for superior cooling. Blue 120mm LED fans have been fitted to the front intake, rear exhaust and roof, keeping the processor incredibly cool, even when overclocked and under load. Annoyingly, you won’t be able to use the top side-panel mount because the huge CPU cooler gets in the way.
The system always felt snappy and responsive, thanks to an incredibly fast OCZ Vertex 4 SSD, which is used as a boot disk. Should the 128GB boot partition not be enough for you, Arbico has also installed a 1TB mechanical hard disk for multimedia storage. There’s plenty of room for expansion, too, with four 3.5in drive bays and three SATA ports being spare. As always, the dual-slot graphics card blocks access to one of the two PCI-Express X1 slots, but there are still three PCI slots and a second PCI-E x16 slot available for add-in cards. Two of the four memory banks are empty too, so you can add more RAM without removing what’s already installed.
Considering the massive CPU heat sink, we think overclocking the i5-3570k to 4.2GHz is a little conservative. We’ve seen the same chip overclocked to 4.4GHz and 4.5GHz. However, it still made a difference in our multimedia benchmarks, scoring 136 overall. This is significantly faster than our reference PC, and it means you’ll be able to tackle almost any desktop application, including multithreaded ones.
This graphics card is starting to show its age, only managing an average frame rate of 35.2 in our Dirt3 test. It was pushed even harder by Crysis 2, where it could only achieve 15.4fps. You must reduce detail settings to play the latest games in DirectX 11 mode.
The Asus VS247H monitor that Arbico bundles with the Elite 3575 CS seems to be all the rage with system builders at the moment, but that’s a good thing. The LED backlit, Full HD panel is a good one, with DVI, VGA and HDMI inputs for plenty of flexibility. It’s a 24in widescreen display, which is a great size for watching films and playing games at your desk. A Logitech keyboard and mouse set complete the system, but these are basic and hardly worth mentioning.
The overclocked processor and SSD make the Elite 3575 CS very quick in desktop applications, although the Nvidia graphics card isn’t quite fast enough to cope with today’s most demanding games. Considering similarly overclocked systems are available for almost £100 less, such as the Palicomp Alpha Excite, it’s difficult to recommend this.
