Arbico eXcel i2561 CS review

Arbico’s eXcel i2561 CS is housed in a plain, black Gigabyte case that failed to quicken our pulse. The same can’t be said of the monitor: a 24in AOC model with a bright, even LED backlight and natural-looking colours. It even has a reasonable pair of speakers built in.

Inside the case we found an Intel Core i5-2500, which is unusual for an Intel chip as it doesn’t support Hyper-Threading. However, it has four physical cores so it ploughed through our new benchmarks with ease, scoring 99 overall. This is reassuring as it matched our reference PC which has an almost identical i5-2500K chip (the “K” variant is unlocked for overclocking). Along with a staple 4GB of RAM, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an application that will slow the eXcel i2561 CS down.

Like many budget PCs, the eXcel i2561 CS doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, relying instead on the Core i5’s integrated Intel HD Graphics chipset. This struggled to play any of our benchmark games, even with low quality settings, but older games may run. The dedicated chip is capable of decoding HD video, and there’s an HDMI output that you can feed to a home cinema system.

If you’d like to play games, there are two free PCI-E x16 slots for upgrades. Just bear in mind that the 500W power supply may not be able to handle some of the more powerful cards, even though there’s room in the case for them. This room comes at the expense of hard disk trays: there’s room for only one extra internal disk. You could always use the two external bays, but with more than two hard disks another problem rears its head: heat. There’s just one fan, mounted at the rear, so there’s little air flow through the case.