Arbico HD6488 review

The Arbico HD6488 is a family-oriented desktop designed to do a bit of everything, from web browsing and desktop tasks, to photo editing or a spot of gaming. While it won’t match a more expensive or specialised computer when it comes to any of those tasks, it’s reasonably well equipped to do all them.

The HD6488 uses a neat little CIT case that we’ve seen used for a lot of low-cost PCs. Its mesh front panel and matt black chassis look neutral enough to fit into most rooms, and it’s small enough to sit either on or under a desk without towering over you. Its interior is well finished and reasonably spacious. There’s scope to add a graphics card of around 350mm in length, although fitting larger cards requires a bit of wiggling to get them into position behind the upright strut that runs up the right-hand side of the case adjacent to the front panel.

The strut supports your drive bays and has a vertical mounting point for a 2.5in drive at the bottom. Above that are four 3.5in bays, one occupied by a 1TB hard disk, and two 5.25in bays. One 5.25in bay is vacant and the other holds a DVD-RW drive. There’s space for a case fan just behind the front panel, but this will cut into your available room for a graphics card. However, with only a single 80mm rear fan to cool the case, we’d advise adding a front fan to go with any upgrades that might run hot. There are also two fan mounts on the right side panel.

These mounting points are perforated, which means that the panel does little to keep system noise down. The case and CPU fans don’t make much sound, but the generic-looking Ace power supply’s built-in fan makes a surprising racket. This means the PC emits a constant rushing sound even when idle. Although the power supply is rated at 650W, you may want to replace it with a recognisable and well-reviewed brand if you plan on adding any particularly power-hungry components.

The system is equipped with 8GB of 1,600MHz RAM in two 4GB modules. There are two unused memory slots, and the motherboard can handle up to 32GB. 8GB is plenty of memory to run Windows 8.1 smoothly and even carry out hobbyist photo- and video-editing tasks. The MSI A88XM-E45 motherboard has a couple of PCI-E x16 slots and supports AMD’s CrossFireX standard, which allows you to link two compatible graphics cards or even combine the processor’s on-chip AMD Radeon HD 8470D graphics with a compatible PCI-E card. Only the top slot runs at x16; the bottom one runs at x4. There’s also a PCI-E x1 slot and PCI slot for older expansion cards. It’s worth noting that installing a graphics card in the top x16 slot will block the x1 slot.