Eclipse Solar i76r577 review

The Eclipse Solar i76r577 comes in an imposing black tower case with the power supply at the bottom, so the motherboard and components are easy to access. It’s powered by an Intel Core i5-760, with a dedicated ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphics card and a stunning BenQ G2220HD monitor.

Eclipse hasn’t overclocked the Core i5, as other manufacturers have done, so it runs at its stock speed of 2.8GHz. This resulted in an overall score of 140 and consistent scores across the range of tests, which is more than enough power for most needs. The 4GB of RAM fitted is more than enough for most applications, although if you plan on editing large photos or video you may consider adding more DIMMs to the two free slots.

As well as being easy to access, the Solar i76r577’s motherboard has two free PCI slots and four vacant PCI-Ex1 slots, although one is obscured by the graphics card’s heatsink and fan. There are plenty of free drives bays, and in addition to the three free SATA II headers, there are two SATA III headers. Mechanical hard disks aren’t fast enough to take advantage of SATA III’s speeds, but you could consider adding a solid state disk (SSD) for faster boot times.

The Radeon HD 5770 is our favourite budget graphics card and the least expensive card we’d recommend for serious gamers. It scored 65.2fps in our Call of Duty 4 test and 36.8fps in Crysis, so it’s able to handle the latest games without having to reduce settings: at the monitor’s native Full HD resolution, it still managed 31fps with detail set to High and 4x AA.

BenQ’s G2220HD is a fantastic 22in monitor with a bright, even backlight and natural colours. The matt finish on the screen does little to dull the image, and contrast is superb. Its menu system is clear and easy to use, with fine controls for colour temperature as well as some image preset modes that we found too overblown.

Support for USB3 and SATA III means the motherboard has plenty of upgrade potential. As well as two USB3 ports on the rear panel, you get two eSATA ports, one just above the front of the case and one on the rear panel. Audio can be output via a set of 7.1 line out sockets, an optical S/PDIF port or the graphics card’s HDMI port.

The Microsoft keyboard and mouse set are fairly decent budget models. The keyboard has a numberpad and multimedia shortcuts, and is reasonably comfortable to type on, while the mouse is a simple two-button model with a ratcheted wheel action.

This PC strikes a good balance between its parts: a powerful processor, a decent graphics card, a superb display and a future-proof motherboard with support for the latest technologies. This excellent combination of components means that this PC wins our Best Buy award.