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CyberPower’s Gamer Infinity 850 is one of two PCs in our £650 category with a dual-core rather than a quad-core processor. However, with 4GB of RAM and a Core 2 Duo E8500 it still performed well in our benchmarks. This is due mainly to the fact that each core runs at a blistering 3.16GHz, which helped the PC to keep pace in applications that don’t use all four cores of a quad-core processor. The Infinity 850 fell behind only in our TV & Movies video encoding test, which uses all processor cores. There’s plenty of power to play games, with a smooth 31fps in our Call of Duty 4 test. However, its score of 15.3fps in our Crysis test is slow compared with the 23fps from Eclipse’s £650 PC. The Infinity 850’s Radeon HD 4670 graphics card has plenty of outputs. It has HDMI and DisplayPort, alongside the usual VGA and DVI, but you can still only use two monitors simultaneously. We were disappointed with the 22in Hanns.G widescreen display’s image quality. It’s bright, but large areas of white have a beige tint and small text looks fuzzy. Viewing angles are also quite tight, so colour accuracy suffers unless you sit directly in front of it. The Infinity 850 is distractingly noisy too, although it’s still quieter than the company’s ridiculously loud Gamer Infinity GT in the £800 category. You won’t be able to fit more RAM than the 4GB it comes with, but otherwise there are plenty of internal expansion options. There are six 3?in drive bays for adding more hard disks and three spare 5?in bays for extra optical drives, which should be more than enough for most people. There are also three PCI slots for internal peripherals such as TV tuners and WiFi adaptors – only Eclipse’s Andromeda has more slots.
Compared with the competition, CyberPower’s Gamer Infinity 850 is a disappointment. Its performance is below par, as is the monitor – even though it’s larger than most. Factor in the irritating fan noise, and this is not a PC we can recommend.
