Arbico Value 9650XL review

Arbico’s 9650XL is a particularly poor performer for its price, with benchmark scores well below similarly priced systems.

The AMD Phenom X4 9650 processor is an old model now, having been superseded by AMD’s Phenom II range. Also underpowered is the onboard Nvidia GeForce 8200 graphics processor, which failed to run our Crysis frame rate test. Inexplicably, although the PC comes with a decent Logitech mouse, it has a Sumvision keyboard that feels cheap and isn’t particularly nice to type on.

It’s not all bad news, though. The 19in Digimate monitor may be small, but it’s bright and has good viewing angles. The PC is built into a slightly tacky-looking windowed case, but this does a good job of reducing fan noise to an unobtrusive hum. A memory card reader in the front panel can handle all the usual formats, with the bonus of being able to read microSD cards without an adaptor. It also adds a third USB port to the two existing front ports.

Side and rear case fans ensure that the components stay cool. The basic specification doesn’t include any expansion cards, but there’s lots of room for your own upgrades. The Asrock K10N78 motherboard has a free PCI-E x16 slot, two PCI-E x1 slots, three PCI slots and two free memory slots that you can use to upgrade to a maximum of 16GB of RAM.

Without a graphics card to draw extra power, this is also one of the most energy-efficient PCs around, with an idle power consumption of 72W and an active power consumption of 98W with the processor under heavy load. Don’t be fooled by the two-year warranty, as the second year covers labour, but not parts, so you’ll be better off fixing problems yourself after 12 months.

The Arbico 9650XL’s performance was among the worst of any PC we’ve seen lately, and it isn’t exactly cheap. If you’re specifically looking for a low-power desktop, opt for a nettop such as Asus’s new Eee Box but for any other purpose, CCL’s CCL-CS1009 is more powerful and Mesh’s Matrix II 620 HD has a better specification, more storage and a bigger monitor.