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While most PCs at this price have an Intel Core i5 processor, PC Specialist has fitted the Aurea 540 with an overclocked Intel Core i3-530 chip. The cheaper CPU means that the company has more money left to spend on other components, while hitting the £750 price. In this case a good chunk of money has been spent on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 460.
Scores of 73.3fps in Call of Duty 4 and 44.1fps in Crysis put this PC way ahead of other computer’s we’ve reviewed at this price. It wasn’t quite fast enough playing Crysis at the monitor’s native 1,920×1,080 resolution with textures set to Very High, scoring 26fps, but at the High setting it managed 37fps with 4x AA. This shows that it’s capable of running any modern 3D game with few compromises in image quality, and with Nvidia’s CUDA technology, it will also speed up certain operations in GPU-accelerated programs, such as Photoshop.
Although the Aurea 540 OC’s Core i3 can’t match the Core i5-760 found in other £750 PCs, it’s still far more powerful than most people would ever need. A score of 131 overall means it’s 31 per cent faster than our reference PC, and a score of 164 in the single-threaded image-editing test means it will tear through single-threaded applications. It may slow down a bit in multi-threaded applications, but it’s still more than capable.
If you’re into gaming, the Aurea 540 OC is ideal as it puts the focus on the graphics card rather than the processor, but buy it without the awful HKC monitor. If you’re not bothered about games, we recommend the Eclipse Solar i76r577, which comes has a faster Core i5 processor and a decent monitor.
