To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
Aria’s Proteus Anubis HDK isn’t the snazziest looking PC you can buy for £999, but looks shouldn’t matter too much when your top priority is getting the most powerful PC for your money. This liquid-cooled system certainly has the right specification, with an Intel Core i5-2500K processor that’s been overclocked to 4.6GHz and a 2GB Radeon HD 6950 graphics card. There’s even a 64GB Kingston SSD which is used for its Windows partition, allowing it to boot faster than a system with a conventional hard disk.
The motherboard is an MSI P67A-G45, with four SATA2 and two SATA3 ports, two PCI slots, three PCI-E x1 slots and two PCI-E x16 slots. The hefty graphics card in the top PCI-E x16 slot blocks access to one of the x1 slots, but there’s still plenty of room to upgrade. One of the PCI slots is occupied by a wireless adaptor, which is a useful addition. Two 4GB memory modules give you enough RAM for intensive tasks like virtualisation and video editing, and the remaining two slots are easily accessible for upgrades thanks to the space-efficient liquid cooler.
The Anubis put in a solid performance, with an overall score of 131] in our tests. That’s thanks to the huge 1.3GHz overclock from the processor’s stock speed of 3.3GHz. The Radeon HD 6950 also made the grade, with frame rates of 51.3fps in Stalker and 67.5fps in Crysis.
At the back of the PC are plenty of USB ports – eight USB2 and two USB3 – as well as a FireWire port. There aren’t any eSATA ports, though. There’s also a PS/2 port which can be used for a mouse or keyboard, plus 7.1 analogue audio outputs and both optical and co-axial S/PDIF outputs. There are another two USB ports on the front of the PC, as well as an extremely versatile memory card reader than can handle most formats you’re likely to encounter. Built into the same unit is a dock for 2.5in SSDs. This combined card reader and SSD dock, the 1TB hard disk and the 64GB internal SSD occupy three of the case’s seven 3.5in drive bays; a Blu-ray drive occupies one of three 5.25in bays. The case itself is solidly build and fairly well shielded against noise and dust.
The system comes with a 22in BenQ G2222HDL monitor. It’s one of our favourite displays, with lush colours and even backlighting. However, we would have preferred a larger screen for this price. We weren’t too fond of the Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop 700, which gave us difficulty with a jerky cursor and missing letters until we moved its wireless receiver down so that it was right next to the mouse and keyboard. Both peripherals were comfortable to use, though.
With a small monitor and a basic one-year warranty that doesn’t even cover postage costs, Aria’s PC isn’t the best value. Although it doesn’t boot into Windows quite as fast, we prefer the identically priced Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire thanks to its better warranty, larger screen and more powerful graphics card.
