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Arbico’s Elite 8400 OCX blitzed through our 3D graphics tests thanks to its powerful Radeon HD 4870 graphics card. It scored a remarkable 74fps in Call of Duty 4 and managed a smooth 35fps in Crysis. It’s easily the most powerful PC here for gaming. Unfortunately, the Elite’s constant humming makes it one of the noisiest PCs in our round-up, so you’ll definitely want to keep it under your desk. The Elite wasn’t quite as record breaking in our applications benchmarks, since it’s one of only two PCs in our £800 category to have a dual-core rather than a quad-core processor. Despite Arbico overclocking the E8400 from 3GHz to 3.6GHz, we’d have expected better performance from a PC costing this much. There are plenty of ports, slots and bays for adding extra peripherals and upgrades. The Elite has 11 USB ports in total – more than any other PC here – so you’re unlikely to need a USB hub. There are two PCI and two PCI Express x1 slots for installing peripherals such as TV tuners and WiFi adaptors. If the 500GB hard disk isn’t large enough, you can slot more hard disks into the five empty 3?in bays, but there are only four free SATA ports. If you need to add a Blu-ray drive or a second DVD writer for faster disc copying, there are three spare 5?in drive bays. Although the 22in Acer widescreen display doesn’t have as high a resolution as the Iiyama monitor that comes with Mesh’s Matrix II 940 CS, its resolution of 1,680×1,050 is still enough for working in large documents. It’s bright with reasonably wide viewing angles. Large areas of white look greyish, but it’s still one of the better-quality monitors here.
If you want the fastest possible 3D performance out of the box, Arbico’s Elite 8400 OCX is the one to buy. Its noisiness can be distracting though, so it just misses out on an award. If you’d rather have a powerful PC that doesn’t make as much racket, opt for Mesh’s Matrix II. It’s not quite as fast in 3D games as the Elite, but it’s better value overall.
