Cyberpower Infinity Apollo GT Pro review

With the Infinity Apollo GT Pro, Cyberpower has installed a powerful graphics card, keeping the rest of the system’s price down by using an overclocked, but cheap, processor. This could be a shrewd move for a PC system aimed at gamers, because processing power isn’t the be-all-and-end-all of PC gaming.

The innards of the PC are housed in a black NZXT Source 220 mid-tower case. It’s a mostly understated case, but the jaunty design of the front panel gives it a distinctive, if slightly bizarre look. The front panel it juts out at a slight angle and the top edge points slightly downwards, giving MC Escher a run for his money and throwing off the perspective of the casual onlooker.

While far from a noisy PC, the fan whir from the graphics card and processor heatsink fan is a little louder than some of the £700 systems we’ve tested. Happily, noise levels didn’t increase substantially while we performed our tough benchmark tests.

There are two front-facing USB ports (one USB2 and one USB3), along with 3.5mm audio input and output jacks, while there are a further two USB3 and two USB2 ports at the rear, along with three more 3.5mm audio jacks and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The graphics card, meanwhile, has two DVI outputs along with HDMI and DisplayPort connectors.

Cyberpower also supplies a terrific keyboard and mouse: the Cooler Master Devastator set is among the best we’ve seen from a £700 PC, with impressive blue backlighting on both keyboard and mouse and great build quality to match.

The Intel Pentium G3258 processor, released in 2014 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Pentium brand, is a cheap dual-core processor that can easily be overclocked. Cyberpower has duly increased its clock speed from 3.2GHz to 4.5GHz.

It has speedy single-core performance, scoring 104 in our image rendering benchmarking tests. In real-world use, browsing image-heavy web pages and working on documents, it was very snappy indeed. However, with only two cores and no Hyper-Threading, it didn’t fare so well in our more challenging benchmarks, scoring 69 for video rendering and just 55 on the multitasking test. This means performance in tasks that benefit from chips with more than two cores such as video and photo processing will be below average when compared to other £700 PC systems, and you may also feel the difference in some games, too.

While the processor may be lacking, Cyberpower has equipped the machine with a high-end graphics card in the form of the 2GB MSI GeForce GTX 770. It performed extremely well in both of our graphics benchmarking tests. Running Dirt Showdown at Ultra settings at 1,920×1,080 pixel resolution with 4x anti-aliasing, the Infinity Apollo GT Pro achieved an average frame rate of 81fps, which is a very good result. In our Crysis 3 benchmark on High settings, it produced 48.6 fps.

Storage is also an area where the Infinity Apollo GT Pro comes up short: just a single 1TB WD hard disk is included. There’s no separate SSD for installing applications and games, and there’s no SSD cache within the mechanical drive, so if you want that increased performance you’ll have to spend a little more when configuring your system.

There’s room to expand your storage if you want: the Asus H81M-D Plus motherboard only has room for a total of two SATA3 and two SATA2 devices. The two SATA3 slots are occupied already by the DVD drive and the hard disk, but both of these could be moved to the SATA2 slots as neither benefit from the increased speeds of SATA3.

Nonetheless, there’s not a huge amount of room for expansion thanks to the paltry three PCI-E slots. A single PCI-E x16 slot is filled by the graphics card, which in turn also obstructs one of the two PCI-E x1 slots. There are two RAM slots, both filled by 4GB DDR3 sticks, so if you want to expand your memory you’ll have to buy two larger modules.

The included AOC E2461FWH monitor has a TN panel with a 2ms response time, making it suitable for gaming. Its image quality is also adequate, although the overall picture is slightly hampered by fairly narrow viewing angles and that it can only produce 89 per cent sRGB colour gamut, according to our colour calibrator.

The Cyberpower Infinity Apollo GT Pro is a good overall PC package with a great keyboard and mouse. However it’s slightly let down by its processor, which simply can’t match the performance of Haswell and Devil’s Canyon Intel Core i5 chips. We would have preferred a slightly better balanced system with a more powerful processor and a mid-range graphics card, as demonstrated by the Chillblast Fusion Obelisk.