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The cyberpower infinity Achilles XT has a modest case. It’s small and light enough not to get in the way and is easy to move if necessary, but it still feels quite sturdy. Inside, there are eight 31/2in drive bays, one of which is external, plus three 51/4in bays.
The bays contain a DVD-RW, a 60GB SSD and a 1TB HDD. Although the use of an SSD as a system drive produces the fast boot speeds we expect from a high-end modern PC, its small capacity means that there’s barely any space left to install anything once Windows is on there. This means you’ll have to install most applications on the 1TB hard disk, thus losing out on the potential benefit of the SDD’s faster read-write speeds.
The Achilles has an MSI Z77A-G43 motherboard and a non-overclockable Intel Core i5-3470 processor. It’s still one of Intel’s new performance Ivy Bridge CPUs, though, and it scored 114 overall in our benchmark tests. That’s a fair bit more than our reference non-overclocked Sandy Bridge Core i5-2500K, and still powerful enough to handle all modern software with ease.
An Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 graphics card with 1GB of memory provides enough power to run Dirt 3 at a frame rate of 54fps, but it didn’t provide smoothly playable speeds when we ran Crysis 2 at Ultra quality, producing just 23fps. Dropping the quality still leaves you with good looking gaming graphics.
The PC has the standard 8GB of memory that you’d expect from any decent system on the market right now, and we’ve had good experiences with the stability of similar 1,333MHz Kingston ValueRAM modules in the past. There are two free memory slots, too, so upgrading’s easy. The motherboard can handle a maximum 32GB of RAM.
There are two PCI-E x1 slots, but one’s blocked by the graphics card, and we’d have preferred more. There are, however, three PCI slots, all of which are vacant, and a second PCI-E x16 slot (which actually runs at x4), that you can use for PCI-E x1 or x4 expansion cards. There’s plenty of room to add extras such as TV tuners and Wi-Fi cards. At the back of the motherboard there are eight USB ports, which is generous for a budget board. Only two of them are USB3, though. There are another two standard USB ports on the front panel, too. On top of that are the usual 7.1 analogue audio outputs, a PS/2 port and a Gigabit Ethernet port, but no eSATA port.
The supplied keyboard and mouse do their job well. The Logitech K120 keyboard rattles a little, but is accurate to type on and the B110 mouse is comfortable to use. Unfortunately, the Edge10 M2410XX monitor didn’t do much to impress us. It’s a matt 23.6in 1,920×1,080 monitor with DVI and VGA inputs, but it has a strong blue tint that’s noticeable on white backgrounds.
At £800, this PC comes close to matching the specification and performance of many systems that cost £200 more. Its non-overclocked processor is powerful enough to run modern and future software. At this price, we can even forgive the small SSD. It’s a great value system, but we strongly recommend buying it without the monitor.
