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CyberPower’s Gamer Infinity 600 uses the same spacious Cooler Master midi tower case as Arbico’s CD7400 XL, but the inclusion of extra case fans makes it much noisier. The side window reveals blue cold cathode lights and the fascia is also illuminated, so its looks could put you off. The Gamer Infinity came top of the £500 PCs in our PCMark Vantage Overall benchmark test but its performance in our other tests was mediocre. We were disappointed by its 3D performance – it managed a jerky 14fps in Call of Duty 4 and just 5.9fps in Crysis. The Infinity 600’s Core 2 Duo E8500 is an incredibly fast processor and won a Best Buy in last month’s Labs. However, several other £500 PCs here managed better results. The Nvidia GeForce 9500GT graphics card has plenty of memory but can’t handle the latest games at high resolutions. As with any budget PC, sacrifices have been made to cut costs. Some of these, such as the relatively small 320GB hard disk, are easily addressed by buying a second disk. Others, such as the limited expansion potential of the MSI P31 Neo-F motherboard, are harder to fix. It supports a maximum of 4GB of RAM, which is already fitted. As 64-bit Windows Vista will support more, it would be nice to have the option to upgrade. The 19in widescreen Hanns.G HG191A monitor has only a VGA port and lacks any form of digital input. We had no major complaints about its quality but it’s not among the best here, thanks to slightly washed out pale tones and fiddly adjustment buttons.
The three-year warranty seems tempting, but the second two years cover labour costs only – not parts. The Gamer Infinity 600 isn’t an ideal budget games PC. It proved fast in PCMark Vantage but fell behind other £500 systems in our game tests. If you have £500 to spend, opt for Eclipse’s Matrix i74n96GS PC for gaming or Mesh’s Nero 9850HD for its multimedia and upgrade potential.
