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The Eclipse Viper i5357R795 OC’s case isn’t particularly remarkable (it gets rather warm despite a plethora of cooling fans and feels rather cramped inside), but the system runs quietly, doesn’t have too many large vents to let dust in and looks inoffensive. Eclipse’s habit of hot-gluing components in place so they don’t get damaged in transit can be a bit nerve-wracking when you want to upgrade, but the glue comes off easily enough with a little care.
At the top of the case are two USB ports, a memory card reader and front-panel audio I/O. Behind the front panel are four 51/2in drive bays, one of which is occupied by a DVD-RW drive, an externally facing 3.5in drive bay and four internal 3.5in bays. Two of the latter are occupied. One houses a 120GB SSD system disk, and the other houses a 1TB HDD for data.
The SSD is connected to one of the Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard’s two SATA3 ports. The optical drive and HDD are both attached to SATA2 ports. This leaves two free SATA2 ports and one vacant SATA3 port. The motherboard also has three PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, although one of these is blocked by the graphics card. We’d prefer a board with more PCI-E x1 slots, but there’s plenty of room to add upgrades such as sound cards and TV tuners. There’s also a second PCI-E x16 slot, which actually runs at x4 and can handle any PCI-E card up to this speed.
The system has 8GB of RAM. The motherboard can handle a maximum 32GB of RAM, but 8GB is sufficient. The PC’s processor is one of Intel’s powerful new Ivy Bridge CPUs, a Core i5-3570K which Eclipse has overclocked to 4.5GHz, aided by a quiet Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU cooler. It isn’t the fastest overclock we’ve seen on this processor, but with an overall score of 144 in our benchmark tests you’re not going to miss the extra couple of performance points here. The 3570K has enough power to handle anything you care to throw at it.
The graphics card is an AMD Radeon HD 7950 with 3GB of memory. It’s one of the top graphic cards around right now and has the performance to prove it, producing a smooth frame rate of 30fps in Crysis 2 and 55fps in Dirt 3, both at maximum quality. It has DVI and HDMI outputs as well as a couple of Mini DisplayPort connections and can run up to three monitors for Eyefinity multi-display gaming. The motherboard has a fairly limited selection of rear ports. There are just six USB ports, only two of which are USB3. There’s also a PS/2 port, an optical S/PDIF output, three 3.5mm audio outputs and a Gigabit Ethernet port.
The PC comes with Logitech’s basic but effective KM260 keyboard and mouse set. The keyboard is slightly spongy and the mouse might be rather small if you have big hands, but we had no major issues with either. The BenQ V2420 monitor is excellent. It’s a 23.6in matt widescreen with bright, accurate colour and untinted pale tones. It only has VGA and DVI inputs, but we can’t fault its image quality.
We’re really impressed by the accurately coloured monitor and silent running of this system, while the large SSD, 8GB of RAM and a high-end graphics card are always good to have. Even so, the Chillblast Fusion Vantage has a Blu-ray drive and a better graphics card.
