Objects that change colour depending on the direction from which you're viewing them tend to be fascinating. We may have HDR and subsurface-scattering in Pixar movies and games, but shiny Panini football stickers and magnets that have kittens moving back and forth when you walk past your fridge still have the power to captivate all but the strongest-willed souls.
CyberPower has sought to emulate this effect, and has given its latest PC, the Gamer Infinity 870, a shiny multitone, chromatic paint job. This had most of the CPC team crouching and leaning in front of the case to try to find the best combination of colours.
Despite this touch of high-end glamour, costing just over £1,000, the Gamer Infinity belongs squarely in the more budget-conscious, mid-range price bracket. CyberPower charges £116 for the glittery paint, making it cheaper than that previously used by other companies. The system's CPU, the E6300, is the cheapest 6-series Intel Core 2 Duo you can buy and, with each of its cores clocked at 1.86GHz, it's also one of the slowest. Despite this, the E6300 easily came top of our bangs per buck chart in the last CPU Labs test. The E6300 is a good overclocker, so it's surprising that CyberPower has left it untouched. The use of the reference Intel CPU cooler was cause for concern too.
Inside the glammed-up NZXT Zero case lurks an Asus P5N-E SLI, based on the nForce 650i SLI chipset. As we found in this issue's review, this board is prone to overheating when it's overclocked hard, as its voltage circuitry struggles to cope with the higher voltages required for overclocking. Our review board hit FSB speeds in excess of 450MHz, though, so it promised to be able to obtain a significant overclock from the CyberPower's E6300, even with the chip's low 7x multiplier. The bank of four 120mm intake fans on the case's side panel should also help matters, as they balance out the two rear 120mm exhaust fans and the 80mm roof fan quietly expelling warm air. The 120mm front intake fan is effectively blocked off by a rotated hard disk cage, and the front panel is also poorly ventilated.
Although the case is well cooled, it isn't our favourite piece of kit; the thick lacquer covering the paintwork of our review sample was flaking along the edges, and the lightweight, hollow plastic fascia can't compete with the elegance of the Chillblast Phantom's Lian Li, or the Gladiator Trident's sturdy Antec Nine Hundred. The other case choices on CyberPower's website aren't much better either - for example, there's the Asus Vento, which we reviewed in the same month as the first nForce4 SLI motherboard. Even back then, it only scored 63 per cent. Other options include older Cooler Master efforts such as the Praetorian 732, or even the Wave Master, which we reviewed back in Issue 1.
The CyberPower has two 512MB sticks of memory. With their electric blue heatspreaders, the PC2-6400 Geil DIMMs look nice, but they're specified to run at sludgy 5-5-5-15 latencies. Having just a gigabyte of RAM isn't great for gaming, and is in stark contrast to the system's XFX GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card. You might think that this card is out of place in a mid-range PC, but it's a sage move on CyberPower's part - after all, Vista's now here and, as a reference-clocked GTS can't cope with games at 1,920 x 1,200, it's an ideal partner for a nicely priced, 1,680 x 1,050 20in or 22in screen. The system also has plenty of storage in the form of a 250GB S-ATA II Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 and a rapid dual-layer Sony 18x DVD burner.
Although the components are decent, the CyberPower's build quality is poor, with messy wiring and white Sellotape holding cables in place. Blue electrical tape has been used to patch up the cables of one of the fans. If you're paying to have a PC built, you want to see evidence of attention to detail and skill, both of which were lacking.
PERFORMANCE
With a GeForce 8800 GTS, gaming is evidently the system's focus. While not quite as powerful as the 8800 GTX, the GTS is still one of the fastest graphics cards around. As a result, the PC waltzed through our standard Need for Speed: Carbon test. Having only 1GB of RAM will be a problem for the CyberPower in expansive games such as Oblivion; no matter how powerful your graphics card is, you won't be able to enable far-reaching view distances and maintain a smooth frame rate. That said, it's fairly easy to remedy and, unlike some companies, CyberPower doesn't charge a fortune for upgrading from 1GB to 2GB of memory.
It isn't only when it comes to memory that the CyberPower system is a little undernourished, especially compared with some of its rivals. The Trident, costing £1,150 from Gladiator Computers, is our Elite-listed mid-range PC, and has a Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU overclocked to 2.97GHz, and an EVGA nForce 680i motherboard. On paper, the CyberPower, with its stock-speed, 1.86GHz E6300 and nForce 650i board is weaker.
The CyberPower scored 1.19 in our Paint Shop Pro test, well behind the 1.97 of the similarly priced Trident. The Core 2 Duo E6300 in our CPU Labs test scored 1.35 in a P965-based motherboard with 2GB of RAM, so clearly the CyberPower's 1GB of RAM is an issue. However, even in the DVD encoding test, which uses very little system memory, the CyberPower scored a disappointing 1.11, compared to the 1.17 of the Labs' E6300.
Convinced something was amiss, we headed into the BIOS, and indeed there was a problem. The Asus board's BIOS had read the RAM modules' SPD wrongly, and set the memory to run at 5-5-14-21, which can't have helped matters. Additionally, the hard disk wasn't running in S-ATA II mode. To enable this, you have to use Hitachi's Feature Tool utility, and this process had obviously been overlooked during the CyberPower's setup procedure, limiting the hard disk to S-ATA I mode and robbing it of NCQ.
Both of these issues contributed to the CyberPower's overall score of 1.23. This machine was crying out to be overclocked in order to draw closer to the Gladiator Trident's impressive overall score of 2.01. With the 'Vcore Offset' option in the Asus P5N-E SLI set to +100mv, we achieved a stable CPU voltage of 1.5V, which provided the basis for a significant overclock. With an FSB of 380MHz, the CPU ran at 2.66GHz, the same speed as a Core 2 Duo E6700. Any attempt to overclock further was met by the CPU overheating, attesting to the limited patience of the Intel CPU cooler. With a 2.66GHz CPU, benchmark results improved dramatically, with the overall score rising from 1.23 to 1.65. This still wasn't enough to compete with the Gladiator though.
CONCLUSION
In light of the poor showing of the GeForce 7-series in this month's graphics card Labs test, a GeForce 8800 GTS was the right choice of graphics card but, considering the CyberPower's other problems, it looks like a big NOS system in a Ford Mondeo. The reference CPU HSF, poor build quality and incomplete setup all mean that we can't recommend this PC.
