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CyberPower’s Apollo Elite has an imposing Cooler Master Elite case that wouldn’t look out of place under a gamer’s desk. Unlike most PCs at this price, it has a dedicated graphics card: an Nvidia GeForce GT 520. You also get a 22in monitor, a 500GB hard disk and an Intel Core i5 processor.
The latter is an i5-2500 model. This is the ‘locked’ version of the 2500K, which allows overclocking, but its score of 101 overall is more than sufficient for today’s applications. Its four physical cores mean that even with multiple applications open, Windows 7 is still snappy, and 4GB of RAM is also perfectly adequate.
The GT 520 is less impressive: a score of 20.45fps in our low-detail Dirt 3 test shows that some games may run, but the latest titles almost certainly won’t at high quality settings. If you upgrade to a faster graphics card, you’ll have to remove the GT 520, so it’s a wasted investment. The same applies to the fitted RAM: if you need more headroom, maybe for editing large video files, you’ll have to get rid of the existing memory modules to fit larger ones, as there aren’t any free slots.
Strangely, there’s plenty of room for expansion elsewhere: the Cooler Master Elite case has numerous free drive bays, and there’s room for even the longest graphics cards. Even the tiny motherboard still has two PCI slots and one PCI-E x1 slot free, along with four free SATA headers for hard disks or optical drives.
Externally, we were disappointed not to find any USB3 ports. You get a fairly standard complement of eight USB ports, but two of these are taken up by a budget keyboard and mouse set from Logitech. We found the keys a bit bouncy, and the mouse felt too light, but they’re usable. Audio outputs are limited to three analogue minijack sockets, although you can output digital audio as well as video via the graphics card’s HDMI port.
Another wasted investment is the AOC F22+ monitor. It’s not the worst display, but compared to the LED-backlit models available with other systems it’s dull and lacks contrast. The backlight was uneven and colours were washed out. The F22+ has a DVI input, but CyberPower doesn’t include a DVI cable in the box, so you’ll have to start with an analogue VGA connection. The monitor’s auto-configuration works quite well, so the image was much crisper than on some analogue connections.
You can buy the Infinity Apollo Elite for £457 without the monitor, making it much better value, but we still can’t recommend it. The Palicomp Phoenix i5 Laser costs £485 without the monitor, but gives you far more room for expansion, with two free RAM slots and an empty PCI-E x16 slot, plus a 1TB hard disk and a Blu-ray drive. If you don’t already have a monitor, the Dino PC Jurassic 2500 has a great 24in BenQ display, and still has room for a graphics card should you wish to upgrade later.
