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Following Intel’s announcement of a flaw in the SATA ports of its Sandy Bridge chipset, we’d recommend holding off buying any such PC until the issue is resolved
CyberPower’s heavily overclocked Infinity i5 Silent Edition is the first PC we’ve reviewed that uses one of Intel’s new Sandy Bridge Core i5 processors and the LGA1155 socket. Like the last couple of Intel core releases, this combination is expected to prompt a major shake-up among system builders.
The Infinity’s performance was everything we’d hoped for. It clocked up the highest Overall score we’ve ever seen, a whopping 219. Its video encoding test score of 246 was also staggeringly high. Essentially, in terms of performance the Infinity i5 Silent Edition jumps up and down on top of every other PC we’ve ever reviewed. Now we’ve established that we’re dealing with a stunning piece of hardware, let’s take a look at what the rest of the system has to offer. After all, even a powerful overclocked processor has only limited uses without other high-end hardware to support it.
Fortunately, CyberPower hasn’t skimped here, either. The PC comes equipped with a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 graphics card, which produced some very credible frame rates in our gaming tests. We got 64fps in the aging Call of Duty 4, while our more graphically intensive tests produced rates of 29.7fps in Crysis and 28.2fps in our new STALKER sun shafts tests. This is by no means the best gaming graphics card around, but it should certainly be able to handle all the latest titles with little or no reduction of quality.
There’s not much else in the PC – just a 1TB hard disk, DVD-RW drive and 4GB of DDR3 memory with a maximum speed of 1600MHz. You can install up to 32GB of memory, although anything above 8GB is overkill and the current 4GB should be more than adequate for most tasks.
The MSI P67A-C45 motherboard provides a decent amount of room for expansion. There are two PCI-E x1 slots, although one is blocked by the graphics card, and three empty PCI slots. That should be plenty of room for all the sound cards, TV tuners and extra ports you could want. The motherboard itself has a whopping ten USB ports on the back, two of which are USB3. Inside, you’ll find four SATA II ports and two SATA III ports. There’s no support for eSATA, but USB3 is set to take over for fast external storage anyway. A FireWire port is also included; this is something of a rarity these days, but it might come in handy if you have an old video camera. The case’s front panel is wired up with two more USB ports and yet another FireWire connection. We were also very pleased with the case design, which provides enough bays for six more 3.5in drives, two of them external, and three more 5.25in drives. There’s also a liquid cooling system that takes the place of the usual CPU fan and heat sink array; this makes a distinctive hum, but it’s unobtrusive and largely damped by the case’s sound-proofing foam.
It’s phenomenal to find such a powerful and capable all-round PC for £900. The only major compromise is the monitor, a 22in widescreen LG Flatron E2240 with a single VGA input. In terms of image quality, we have no complaints – it’s bright, evenly lit and produces accurate colours. However, it has a maximum resolution of 1,600×1,200, rather than the now-commonplace Full HD resolution of 1,920×1,080 (1080p). If you don’t already have a monitor that you’re happy with, this will do until you get something better, but it’s worth bearing in mind that you can buy the same PC without the monitor for £765. The included keyboard and mouse are simple but effective wired devices from the budget end of Logitech’s range.
Although the LG monitor wouldn’t have been our first choice, there’s nothing not to like about the Infinity i5 Silent Edition PC itself. It’s a perfect combination of power and functionality, and it’s now our Ultimate award winner.
