CyberPower Infinity SLI 900 Family review

For such a high price, we'd expect CyberPower's Infinity SLI 900 Family to be packed full of the fastest components.

However, we'd also expect a well-balanced choice that reflects the PC's speed and power. Sadly, it's a job CyberPower hasn't quite got right.

Things start out well enough, and the choice of the quad-core Core 2 Extreme QX6800 processor and 2GB of memory is a good one. It's incredibly powerful and helped the PC to a score of 520 in our video-editing test. That's the quickest score we've seen for any PC. With four cores available, there's enough power for you to run a hefty video-encoding session in the background and still be able to carry on with normal desktop tasks easily.

The two Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS graphics cards in SLI mode are another good choice. They powered through our tough Prey test with no trouble at all. Only Call of Duty 2 caused them problems, but this is because Nvidia's Windows Vista drivers don't work with the game's anti-aliasing properly. Future games won't be a problem, though, particularly as the 8800GTS cards are DirectX 10-compatible.

After a promising start, though, CyberPower has made some strange choices. We could live with the single 320GB hard disk, although that seems quite stingy on this budget, but the 19in regular-aspect ViewSonic monitor is a cut too far.

Just one of the Infinity's graphics cards can run any game at the monitor's native resolution of 1,280x1,204; two of them in SLI mode is just a waste. It's even stranger that the monitor has a D-sub input, as the graphics cards have only DVI outputs. For this price, we'd have expected a much better monitor, either a 20in standard-aspect screen or perhaps a 20.1in widescreen display. One of these would have been a better choice even if it meant CyberPower could only supply a single graphics card.

Noise is a big problem with this PC, as the large case fan and graphics card cooling fans create a noticeable whirring hum, especially during gaming or intensive tasks such as video editing. The design of the case itself is a matter of taste, with a transparent, neon blue side panel and a cut-out CyberPower logo on the front. The Logitech gaming mouse is comfortable and responsive, but the USB Logitech keyboard feels springy, which can make extended periods of typing tiresome. The 7.1 Creative surround-sound speakers aren't particularly loud, but they do have plenty of bass.

The Infinity is an impressively fast computer, but its noisiness, high price and poor balance of peripherals made us wince. Unless you have demanding computing needs, cheaper systems, such as Mesh's Elite E6600 GTS, are better value.