CyberPower Infinity Apollo Elite review

CyberPower’s Apollo Elite has an imposing Cooler Master Elite case that wouldn’t look out of place under a gamer’s desk. Unlike most PCs at this price, it has a dedicated graphics card: an Nvidia GeForce GT 520. You also get a 22in monitor, a 500GB hard disk and an Intel Core i5 processor.

The latter is an i5-2500 model. This is the ‘locked’ version of the 2500K, which allows overclocking, but its score of 101 overall is more than sufficient for today’s applications. Its four physical cores mean that even with multiple applications open, Windows 7 is still snappy, and 4GB of RAM is also perfectly adequate.

The GT 520 is less impressive: a score of 20.45fps in our low-detail Dirt 3 test shows that some games may run, but the latest titles almost certainly won’t at high quality settings. If you upgrade to a faster graphics card, you’ll have to remove the GT 520, so it’s a wasted investment. The same applies to the fitted RAM: if you need more headroom, maybe for editing large video files, you’ll have to get rid of the existing memory modules to fit larger ones, as there aren’t any free slots.

Strangely, there’s plenty of room for expansion elsewhere: the Cooler Master Elite case has numerous free drive bays, and there’s room for even the longest graphics cards. Even the tiny motherboard still has two PCI slots and one PCI-E x1 slot free, along with four free SATA headers for hard disks or optical drives.