Cyberpower Gamer Infinity Crossfire GT review

CyberPower's Gamer Infinity Crossfire GT is the first PC we've seen to come equipped with ATI's new high-end DirectX 10-compatible graphics card, the Radeon HD 2900XT.

It will be able to play upcoming DirectX 10-capable games with new graphical effects unavailable to earlier DirectX 9 cards. Despite this new technology, however, the Gamer Infinity Crossfire GT is still very affordable.

We were impressed by how quickly the HD2900XT sped through our Prey 3D test. Its score of 82.5fps matched the performance of the more expensive 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800GTX graphics card. Its score of 55.2fps in our Call of Duty 2 test was also impressive, although it wasn't as fast as the 8800GTX, which managed 73.4fps. The GT is still an impressively fast gaming PC, though, and you can add a second graphics card in CrossFire mode for even better performance if you wish.

Bizarrely, the HD 2900XT doesn't support ATI's UVD technology, which is found in the cheaper HD 2400 and HD 2600 cards. This technology assists the processor in playing back Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, making it available for other tasks.

The GT can also be used for more serious work thanks to the fast Core 2 Duo E6700 processor and 2GB of RAM. It made short work of our taxing video-encoding and multiple-applications tests. It also sped through our image-manipulation benchmark with a score of 266, which is the highest we've ever seen.

Unfortunately, the 22in widescreen monitor is disappointing. Colours looked uneven and washed out, images looked grainy and there was significant speckling in our greyscale and colour transition tests. It's not suitable for image editing. Oddly, the display has only a D-sub socket, while the graphics card has only DVI ports. Thankfully, however, the Logitech cordless keyboard and mouse are more pleasing and they're comfortable to use and responsive.

Gamers will appreciate the Creative X-Fi sound card, which supports EAX processing for more realistic sound effects in games that support them, such as Doom 3. You might want a better-sounding set of speakers to take advantage of this, though. The Creative T6100 5.1 surround-sound speakers sound fine for movies and gaming, but aren't well suited for listening to music. They have a lot of bass, but sound woolly and muffled.

There's plenty of storage space, with two 250GB hard disks joined together as a RAID 0 array, although you can reconfigure them as a RAID 1 array if you wish. This would halve the available amount of storage space, but if one disk fails, all your data will be preserved on the other disk. There's room for three additional hard disks, three more optical drives and a memory card reader or floppy drive.

There are two empty PCI slots for adding peripherals such as TV tuners, but one is tightly pressed up against the graphics card and the other would be blocked if you added a second graphics card. You won't have to add wireless networking or eSATA cards, though, as these are integrated into the motherboard.

The Gamer Infinity Crossfire GT is a well-specified PC that's impressively fast in both 2D and 3D applications. However, we were disappointed by the monitor's poor image quality. You can get similar games performance from RL Supplies' cheaper Modula 4400 OC.