Arbico OC 7600 XL review

Arbico has concentrated on making the OC 7600 XL as fast as possible, but has neglected the hard disk, graphics card and monitor in the process.
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Published on 21 October 2010

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Arbico OC 7600 XL
Our rating
Reviewed price £750 inc VAT

Arbico’s OC 7600 XL is an overclocked monster, with an Intel Core i5-760 running at 3.66GHz (up from its stock speed of 2.8). This may not seem like a big increase, but its scores in our benchmarks were similar to Core i7 chips that cost hundreds of pounds more. It did especially well in our video-encoding test, scoring 179; this makes it well-suited to video encoding and 3D rendering applications. Sadly, Arbico seems to have put all its eggs in one basket. Relatively speaking, it has spent little on the monitor, graphics card and other components and it’s one of the only £750 PCs we’ve seen with a 500GB rather than a 1TB hard disk. Even the keyboard and mouse set are the cheapest models here, and look horribly tacky next to the budget Microsoft and Logitech sets provided by other manufacturers. Arbico has opted for an HKC 22in monitor. Its image quality is awful, with a dark, uneven backlight, and a strong blue cast that makes the image look cold. The menu system is crude and ugly, with only basic colour adjustments that did little to improve colour accuracy. We’d strongly advise dropping the monitor and putting the £95 you save towards a better monitor, such as the BenQ G2222HDL.

Arbico OC 7600 XL
We’d expect to get a muscular graphics card with our £750, so we were slightly disappointed with the ATI Radeon HD 5750 fitted to the OC 7600 XL. It scored 59.8 fps in Call of Duty 4 and 27.5fps in Crysis. Both are respectable scores but less than we’d expect for this price. At the monitor’s native, Full HD resolution, you’d have to turn anti-aliasing off to get a playable frame rate in Crysis. It’s also worth noting that the card lacks a VGA port, and Arbico failed to include a DVI cable in the box. Elsewhere, Arbico’s choice of components is better: the Asus P7P55D-E motherboard includes USB3 and SATA III and plenty of expansion card slots. There’s a free PCI-E x16 slot, so you could potentially link another ATI 5750 graphics card, but the small improvement this gives means this slot is probably better thought of as for extra expansion. The two SATA III headers are only useful if you plan to add a solid state disk (SSD), as mechanical hard disks can’t take advantage of the increased throughput speeds SATA III offers. Externally, you get two USB3 ports to complement the eight standard USB ports, and there’s also FireWire and eSATA, so you have great flexibility in your choice of external drive interfaces. Audio can be output via the 7.1 line out ports, optical S/PDIF, or via the graphics card’s HDMI output. It’s a shame that Arbico didn’t provide a better quality keyboard and mouse. The keyboard looks and feels awful. Its flat keys are wobbly and have no feedback. The mouse’s see-through design is tacky, and it’s far too small.

If you absolutely need as much multi-core processing power as possible, you could justify buying the OC 7600 XL without the monitor for £655; for most people, this much performance isn’t necessary, and you’ll be compromising in other areas. Eclipse’s Solar i76r577 is far better value: although it’s not overclocked, it has a far better graphics card and monitor, and twice the storage space.

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Barry de la Rosa has written various articles on a range of topics covering everything from TVs to mobile phones.

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