Arbico Elite 3575 CS review

Considering the massive CPU heat sink, we think overclocking the i5-3570k to 4.2GHz is a little conservative. We’ve seen the same chip overclocked to 4.4GHz and 4.5GHz. However, it still made a difference in our multimedia benchmarks, scoring 136 overall. This is significantly faster than our reference PC, and it means you’ll be able to tackle almost any desktop application, including multithreaded ones.

This graphics card is starting to show its age, only managing an average frame rate of 35.2 in our Dirt3 test. It was pushed even harder by Crysis 2, where it could only achieve 15.4fps. You must reduce detail settings to play the latest games in DirectX 11 mode.

The Asus VS247H monitor that Arbico bundles with the Elite 3575 CS seems to be all the rage with system builders at the moment, but that’s a good thing. The LED backlit, Full HD panel is a good one, with DVI, VGA and HDMI inputs for plenty of flexibility. It’s a 24in widescreen display, which is a great size for watching films and playing games at your desk. A Logitech keyboard and mouse set complete the system, but these are basic and hardly worth mentioning.

The overclocked processor and SSD make the Elite 3575 CS very quick in desktop applications, although the Nvidia graphics card isn’t quite fast enough to cope with today’s most demanding games. Considering similarly overclocked systems are available for almost £100 less, such as the Palicomp Alpha Excite, it’s difficult to recommend this.