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Arbico’s OC 8400 XL uses a sturdy and fairly quiet Cooler Master case with plenty of room for extra components. It has 10 USB ports – more than any of the other £650 PCs – and its three empty PCI-E x1 slots are ideal if you want to add a sound card, wireless adaptor or TV tuner. The Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L motherboard supports up to 16GB of RAM but you’ll have to switch to Windows Vista 64-bit if you want to take advantage of additional memory, as the OC 8400 XL comes with the 32-bit version of Vista Home Premium installed. Four free SATA ports provide plenty of scope for adding storage and with six free 3?in drive bays you’ll be able to position additional hard disks easily for optimal airflow and cooling. The Core 2 Duo E8400 processor is fast and Arbico has overclocked it from 3GHz to 3.6GHz (as it has with its £800 entry). However, the OC 8400 XL still can’t compete with the Phenom II-based Eclipse Andromeda and Mesh 920 Nero in this price group, both of which were considerably faster. The graphics card in this system is an ATI Radeon HD 4670. This managed to run Call of Duty 4 but is much slower than Eclipse’s GeForce 9800 GTX+. The card has HDMI, DVI and VGA outputs so you’ll be able to connect it to almost any monitor or HD TV. The OC 8400 XL is one of two PCs in the £650 category to come with a 19in widescreen Hannspree XM-S New York monitor. This is smaller than other screens in this group, and its resolution of 1,400×900 is lower too. The image quality isn’t bad, but whites had a pink tint to them.
You don’t get any extras with the Arbico OC 8400 XL to make up for the inferior graphics card. There are no speakers, no memory card reader and no TV tuner. Although the system comes with a two-year warranty, the second year covers labour only, which isn’t much help if the hardware fails. These small faults add up and detract from an otherwise decent PC.
