CyberPower Liquid High 5GHz review

Processors are more powerful than ever, and thanks to cleverly designed Unified Extensible Firmware Interfaces (UEFI – the replacement for BIOS) on the latest Intel chipset-based motherboards, they’re also easier to overclock. Despite the already immense power of recent Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 and i7 chips, there’s an arms race on among system builders to push the new processors as far as they’ll go.

CyberPower’s Liquid High 5GHz is a perfect example. It’s built with an Intel Core i7-2600K, the cheapest unlocked i7, which costs around £200. The processor has been pushed from its native speed of 3.4GHz all the way up to 5GHz. It’s no simple task, and CyberPower has used a lot of high-end liquid cooling to keep it from overheating. This is one of the most dramatic speed increases we’ve seen, although the overclock isn’t entirely stable – we had to reboot once or twice after getting an “overclock failed” message from the UEFI.

Its effectiveness, however, is borne out by its performance in our benchmark tests, where it achieved a massive overall score of 146. That’s even higher than the blistering Wired2Fire Hellspawn XFire, which uses an overclocked Core i5.

Unfortunately, although it’s effective, we have our doubts about the build quality of the Liquid High’s liquid cooling system. The tubes themselves feel sturdy, but cable ties, rather than jubilee clips, are used to help secure the ends of pipes to the cooling system’s components. Meanwhile a bank of fans at the top of the case is only loosely affixed and wobbles. Everything remained dry and secure throughout our review, but we’d handle the entire system with care to prevent anything from coming loose. The case itself is sturdy, large and extremely heavy, but does little to damp the noise of the system’s six fans.