Cyberpower Gamer Infinity Silent Edition review

CyberPower's Gamer Infinity Silent Edition is the first PC we've seen with Intel's Core 2 Duo E6750 processor (our Best Component 2007 award winner) and P35 motherboard chipset.

Although the P35 can support newer DDR3 memory, the Infinity's motherboard only supports older DDR2 RAM. However, it is still impressively fast, as the results of our applications benchmarks show. It managed an excellent score of 329 in our tough video-encoding test.

The Infinity is also a powerful gaming computer, as the results of our 3D benchmarks show. The Nvidia GeForce 8800GTS graphics card will be able to cope with the new DirectX 10 games that are beginning to appear, although the 320MB of memory could limit the quality settings.

As its name suggests, the Infinity is supposed to be quieter than other gaming PCs. The interior of its case is lined with foam to help reduce noise but, although it is quieter than other CyberPower PCs we've tested, it's not a significant difference. The fans are still audible in a hushed room.

The 22in widescreen display has an anti-glare instead of a glossy finish, which reduces reflections from overhead lights. Colours are bright and the screen is evenly lit, but we noticed some banding and speckling in our greyscale and colour transitions tests. It also has a built-in iPod dock as well as a memory card reader and four-port USB2 hub. As well as charging and synchronising your iPod, it can play music from it using the built-in speakers when your computer is off. They're not very loud, though, and sound muffled. Although these extra features are useful, we would have preferred a separate, high-quality speaker set instead.

If the roomy 400GB hard disk isn't spacious enough, there are four 3in drive bays for adding extra disks. You could also fill the two external 3in bays with hard disks instead of a memory card reader and floppy drive. There's also room for three more optical drives, but there are only three SATA ports, so you'd need to install a SATA PCI card if you want to fill all the drive bays.

Adding PCI peripherals could be tricky since one of the PCI slots is pressed up tightly against the graphics card. The other PCI slot and the PCI-E x1 slot could be blocked off if you add another PCI-E x16 graphics card to boost 3D performance. The Infinity's Nvidia graphics card is mismatched with a motherboard that supports ATI's CrossFire dual graphics card technology instead of Nvidia's SLI, so you must replace it with two ATI cards to take advantage of CrossFire.

The Infinity is a fast in both Windows applications and games, but the internal expansion options could make upgrading expensive and difficult.

Author: Alan Lu