CyberPower Gamer Infinity Quad Elite

Verdict: Well-chosen components, well built and great value.

The G0 stepping of the Core 2 Quad Q6600 is awesome. The sSpec code to look for is SLACR - surely not a coincidence given that Intel is an American company, and slacker and gamer are roughly synonymous terms over there. Most companies list the G0 chip as a separate stock item, with Novatech going as far as adding 'This is the one that overclocks' to its description of the chip (http://tinyurl.com/3d6pfb). However, running the chip in the 3GHz range may require better components than those you currently own.

Both the CyberPower and Advance Tec use the Antec Nine Hundred midi-tower case. It's a fine choice, and exactly the case we chose when building our £1k Wonder, which we pitched against a £1,000 Dell machine. We chose it for its looks, value for money and the great cooling provided by the roof-mounted 200mm fan. With two 120mm intake fans, one 120mm intake fan on the side window and a 120mm exhaust fan, it should be easy for either PC to keep an overclocked and overvolted Q6600 cool.

An overclocked CPU needs to be paired with a good overclocking motherboard and high-frequency RAM. Both manufacturers have chosen the Asus P5K-E WiFi-AP motherboard, which is possibly the only Asus P5K-series board we haven't tested. It's obviously up to the job, though, as both manufacturers push their G0-stepping Q6600 well past its 2.4GHz stock speed. Advance Tec opts for a 3.6GHz clock speed, while CyberPower pushes its chip to 3.4GHz. However, raw clock speeds are only part of the story, and CyberPower has been canny with its overclock. We'll delve into this later on, but the P5K-E WiFi-AP provides more than just overclockability.

WiFi is included, giving you an 802.11b/g-compliant aerial; this is joined by a FireWire and two eSATA ports, plus six USB 2 ports and the usual six mini-jack audio outputs on the back of the PC. With a Gigabit Ethernet port, and optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, there's only room for the keyboard PS/2. Inside, the P5K-E WiFi-AP provides four RAM sockets, which CyberPower has populated with two 1GB sticks of OCZ Platinum PC2-8500. Two 1x PCI-E slots are easily accessible above the EVGA 640MB e-GeForce 8800 GTS, which should supply plenty of gaming power.

It's worth noting that as a PC undergoes rigorous testing at the manufacturers', neither company had sufficient time to fully test and qualify a GeForce 8800 GT. However, when ordering this system, it would be worth asking for an 8800 GT, and finding out how this would affect the price.

We wouldn't advise anything more extravagant in the graphics department, as ATI and Nvidia seem poised to release some high-performance parts soon. Certainly, using the CrossFire capability of the Asus motherboard would be a bad move, as the second high-speed PCI-E slot provides only four PCI-E lanes, which will reduce performance.

The Asus board sports six S-ATA II ports, two of which are used for a Western Digital Raptor 74GB system disk and a 250GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 data disk. This provides roughly the same amount of storage as the Advance Tec PC. The Raptor's 10,000rpm spindle speed offers good performance, but its 74GB capacity is very restrictive. It's also noisy, rattling audibly as Vista indexes.

The motherboard has three PCI slots, but only one of these is usable, and even then we'd advise against it. The dual-slot GeForce 8800 GTS covers one slot, while the control card for the Titan Amanda TEC cooler takes the lowest slot. The only visible PCI slot is directly below the hefty graphics card, and would block its fan intake. The Amanda is a good inclusion, as it's one of the more effective CPU HSFs we've seen. CyberPower has used the new version too, with rubber fan mounts to lower the noise level by a claimed 6dBA. However, compared with the Advance Tec, this PC is loud, with an annoying high-pitched tone.

Most of the noise is created by the 120mm Antec TriCool fans, which CyberPower has set at their fastest setting (the 200mm top fan is set to low). By switching these small fans to their slowest setting, the noise dropped considerably, while the CPU still ran at a comfortable 62ûC after we stressed all four cores by running Orthos on the PC for a day. In Issue 50, we applied the same 1.55V overvolt to our test chip, and the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - which is hardly heat-shy - kept the temperature at 78ûC. Part of the Amanda's efficiency is due to its exhaust lining up with the case exhaust, although clearly this air-cooled TEC works well with quad-core CPUs.

The CyberPower is neatly constructed - the manufacturer makes building a neat PC using the Antec Nine Hundred look ludicrously easy (trust us, it isn't). This is despite the fact that the Tagan TG700-U52 PSU doesn't have modular cables. Clearly, CyberPower should get a medal just for the neat cable routeing alone.

Performance

The big overvolt on the CPU is necessary, as the chip runs 1GHz faster than it should. However, while Advance Tec has merely pumped the FSB of its Asus P5K-E WiFi-AP to 400MHz to achieve the 3.6GHz clock speed, CyberPower has been cannier. In our Core 2 Extreme QX6850 review, we found that a quad-core CPU is hungrier than a dual-core CPU for data, so giving it as much bandwidth as possible is advantageous. CyberPower clearly agrees with us, as its CPU is supplied with a multiplier of 8 and an FSB of 425MHz. The chip runs at 3.4GHz, but the higher FSB improves performance. This factor, plus the Raptor hard disk, explains why this PC is almost as fast as the Advance Tec PC with its 3.6GHz CPU.

In the multitasking test, the Raptor and extra CPU-to-memory bandwidth boosted the score by just over 100 points more than the Advance Tec. Given the low temperature of the CPU, we tried pushing it harder. However, at 3.6GHz (8 x 450MHz) Orthos started erroring. Extra CPU PLL voltage and CPU voltage didn't help, so we suspect that CyberPower may have been unlucky and received a chip that's simply a poor overclocker. However, our benchmarks ran stably, scoring 1,501.

Gaming performance was also a close call, with the CyberPower returning a slightly higher minimum frame rate than the Advance Tec (30fps compared to 27fps) in Company of Heroes at 1,680 x 1,050, but a slightly lower average (56fps compared to 59fps). Supreme Commander at 1,280 x 1,024 with 2x AA returned more favourable results for the Advance Tec, with a 9fps minimum and a 60fps average compared to the CyberPower's minimum of 10fps and average of 40fps.

However, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and F.E.A.R. at 1,680 x 1,050, we saw minimums of 35fps and 52fps in the two games respectively, but only 27fps and 30fps from the Advance Tec. Overall, the CyberPower is the better gaming system.

Conclusion

Both PCs cost £850 and include similar components, but the CyberPower's overclock is executed with more finesse, and the Titan Amanda keeps it very cool. Hopefully, you'll receive a better Core 2 Quad Q6600 chip than we did, and be able to push it higher. The graphics card is also faster than the Radeon HD 2900 Pro used in the Advance Tec, while the Raptor helps it in I/O-intensive tasks (even if it is loud). The CyberPower's only major failing is the fans' noise levels, but you can set these to low, and still have a cool-running CPU. This is a great PC at a competitive price.

• Samsung SATA SSD 32GB - Hard disks / storage
• Spore - Games
• Zalman VF1000-LED - Other cooling hardware
• Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev 2 - Other cooling hardware
• Antec Mini P180 - Cases
• Turok - Games
• ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - Graphics cards