Cyberpower Infinity Achilles XT review

This water-cooled version of Cyberpower’s Infinity Achilles XT just scream gaming PC. It has a powerful graphics card, an industrial-looking case and an overclocked Core i5 processor. In addition its water cooling system is immediately obvious, with a blue-lit reservoir occupying two of the case’s three 5 1/2in bays.

The perforated black metal of the Thermaltake case looks good – if you’re a fan of the style, at least. It’s not ideal for sound-proofing, but this is slightly offset by sound-proof foam on the sides and base. Dust can also be a problem with such designs, so thankfully there are fine mesh grilles over the front intake fans. Thanks to the water-cooled CPU heatsink, the air coming out of the PC is barely warm, despite its heavily overclocked processor. However, the PC is still on the noisy side, with a constant hum from both the fans and water cooling pump – you’ll definitely want to keep it on the floor rather than on the desk next to you.

The computer has an Intel Core i5-760 processor, overclocked from 2.8GHz up to 4GHz. 4GB of DDR3 RAM has also been overclocked to 1,600MHz. All this helps the Infinity Achilles XT to achieve one of the highest scores we’ve ever seen in our benchmark tests. An overall score of 183 makes it a safe bet that this PC will be able to handle anything you can throw at it.

When it comes to gaming, though, a powerful processor won’t do you any good without a serious graphics card. In this case, that role is filled by a 768MB Nvidia GeForce GTX 460, which has also been overclocked, this time using MSI’s Afterburner performance booster software. It performed well, performing around 10-15% better than the stock card in some tests: with a frame rate of 74.6fps in CoD4 and 43fps in Crysis. We also ran our new Stalker DX11 benchmark at a resolution of 1,920×1,080 with 4x anti-aliasing, obtaining a frame rate of 27.8fps, only a fraction higher than stock.

The Asus P7P55D-E EVO motherboard has loads of ports and features, including SATA III, six backplate USB ports with two additional USB3 ports, Firewire and eSATA. There’s plenty of upgrade potential, with two PCI slots, three PCI-E x1 slots and two PCI-E x16 slots. One is occupied by the graphics card, which blocks access to one of the PCI-E x1 slots.

The case is spacious and well-finished, with easy-to-fit railed drive caddies. A protruding caddy and a slot in the side of the case are designed to make it easy to pull out and hotswap a SATA drive, but we had trouble doing this without completely removing the slot’s plastic surround. You’ll also find one eSATA and two USB ports on the front panel. A 1TB hard disk and DVD-RW drive round out the specification. The PC comes with a generous three-year RTB warranty.

This is a great PC, but Palicomp’s Best Buy winning Core i5 Blast 760OC4-24, is similarly priced (without its monitor and peripherals), plus it includes a Blu-ray drive and has a slight edge in both applications and games. It’s also worth considering that AMD’s latest cards give great value for money and PCs using these will be available shortly.