Arbico Elite 3578 CS review

There’s plenty of room to install extra drives, fortunately, with five vacant 3 1/2in bays, including an external bay that can take either 5 1/4in or 3 1/2in drives. There are also two more vacant external 5 1/4in bays. On the front panel are two USB ports and 3.5mm headphone and mic ports. At the back of the motherboard you’ll find another six USB ports, two of them USB3. There’s also a PS/2 port, both optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, 7.1 analogue surround sound outputs and a Gigabit Ethernet port.

The supplied mouse and keyboard are budget Logitech wireless models – comfortable to use, if made of rather cheap plastic. The monitor is a Philips 226V3L. It’s only a 21.5in widescreen display, rather than the more common 23.6in models, and doesn’t have an HDMI input, but we were pleased with its accurate colours and wide viewing angles.

This is a carefully built PC with an excellent selection of components. The lack of overclocking means it’s not as quick as it could be, but it also means you don’t have a huge CPU cooler, and the Core i5-3570K processor is very powerful even at its standard settings. The motherboard also makes it easy to make your own speed tweaks in the future. Our only real issue is with the tiny 60GB SSD boot disk. We’d gladly pay a little more for a 120GB disk, which would provide at least a bit of space to install complicated programs which benefit from fast access speeds. The monitor is also rather small, but its image quality helps to compensate. This is a good computer, but it needs a few tweaks to bring it up to speed when compared to systems like the award-winning Chillblast Fusion Blaze.