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Our rating

Reviewed price £950 inc VAT

With the same case that Arbico uses for the majority of its PCs, it’s fair to say that the elite 7646 OCX doesn’t look anything particularly special from the outside. Take the side panel off and have a look inside and it’s a different story. Like so many PCs at this price currently available, Arbico has decided to fit an Intel Core i5-760 processor. It’s a sensible choice, as it’s a real quad-core chip, unlike the majority of the rest of the Core i5 range that have two cores and Hyper Threading, and it overclocks well. In the case of the 7646 OCX, Arbico has increased the processor’s core speed from 2.8GHz to 3.6GHz. This has an obvious boost on performance and this PC did exceptionally well in our benchmarks with an overall score of 173. In other words, it’s powerful enough for any task you can throw at it.

Fortunately, the sensible choice of a large heatsink with a 120mm fan and a secondary 120mm fan at the rear of the case, means that the 7646 OCX remains relatively quiet, while keeping the processor cool. We thought that the 8GB of memory, which takes up all four RAM slots, is a slightly strange choice, particularly with the current price of memory. Given that most people will find that 4GB is more than plenty, we feel as though the money spent on this extra RAM would have been better spent elsewhere. The monitor is a case in point, as the HKC 2249A isn’t a particularly good display. Not matter how we adjusted the settings we found that colours looked overblown. Viewing angles are also pretty bad: move slightly to either side and whites appear to have a pink tint to them. At this price we’d really have expected to see a better monitor. This is particularly true, considering that the 768MB Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 graphics card is capable of running games at the screen’s native resolution of 1,920×1,080. The card included runs at standard clock speeds, which meant that it was little off the pace of similarly-priced PCs in our Call of Duty 4 test, with a frame rate of 71.3fps. However, in Crysis the frame rate of 42.8fps was about what we’d expect. Although the quality of the monitor isn’t particularly good, you won’t be able to use it for watching Blu-ray movies on your PC out of the box, as Arbico provides a DVD writer only. This is a little surprising, as other PCs at this price come with a Blu-ray reader as standard. In terms of the rest of the system, there’s a fair amount to like here. The 1TB hard disk should provide plenty of storage, but there’s plenty of expansion options otherwise, including SATA III ports and two USB3 ports for fast storage. There are also two PCI, two PCI-E x1 and one PCI-E x16 slots for adding expansion cards inside. Combined with a total of 10 USB ports, there’s certainly plenty of room to connect every peripheral that you could want. We were pretty happy with the Logitech wired keyboard and mouse that ship with the PC. We found both comfortable to use and we managed to type quickly and accurately. The two year RTB warranty is also good to see.

Ultimately, the Arbico Elite 7646 OCX is a powerful computer that’s quick in games, but it’s not quite as quick as some of its competitors. The monitor is quite a disappointment and the 8GB of RAM feels like an extravagance that could have been spent elsewhere on the system. As it stands, the Palicomp Core i5 Blast 760OC4-24 is a better choice for most people.

Written by

David Ludlow

David has been fascinated by technology since he first set eyes on the ZX Spectrum 48K. A fan of smartphones, tablets and home automation, he also specialises in home networking. David has worked in tech publishing for more than 20years, working on PCW, Computer Shopper and launching Expert Reviews in 2010.

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Arbico Elite 7646 OCX review

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