Arbico AMD 5885CS review

When building a PC to a tight budget, it makes sense to opt for an excellent balance of components, which is exactly what the Arbico AMD 5885CS does. Like many PCs at this price its core is an AMD A10-5800K Trinity CPU combined with 8GB of RAM.

This 3.8GHz processor can’t quite give the same level of performance as rival Intel processors, scoring 65 overall in our benchmarks. However, its advantage is that it has powerful integrated graphics capable of playing games.

In Dirt Showdown we managed frame rates of 45.2fps in our laptop test, run at a resolution of 1,280×720. We couldn’t get smooth frame rates at 1,920×1,080 until we dropped quality settings to medium, where we managed 35.5fps. Either way you look at it, the A10-5800K is an excellent choice of processor in a PC like this: it’s more than powerful enough for Windows applications and it can play games.

One of the other great things about the A10-5800K is that it can power up to three monitors. With VGA, DVI and HDMI outputs on the motherboard, you can run multiple-monitor PC without having to upgrade the graphics card.

Should you want more graphics performance the excellent Asus F2A85-M LE motherboard has plenty to offer, with two PCI-E x16 slots. The board supports CrossfireX, so you can either add an inexpensive graphics card and combine it with the CPUs onboard GPU, or add two more powerful graphics cards. It also has a PCI slot and a PCI-E x1 slot, although the latter will be blocked if you install a graphics card in the x16 slot above. Two memory slots is a little restrictive and the one area where the motherboard doesn’t excel. However, with 8GB of RAM fitted, you’re most likely not going to need to upgrade in a hurry anyway.

As the motherboard uses one of AMD’s most recent chipsets, it supports all of the latest standards. This includes seven SATA3 ports, so if you want to fit an SSD alongside the 1TB hard disk for faster boot speeds, you’ll get the full benefit of its speed.

Two USB3 ports, next to four USB ports, sit at the back, so you can connect super-fast external storage. It’s a little disappointing that the case’s front panel only has two USB ports, as USB3 is arguably more useful here, and the motherboard has a USB3 header. At the rear there’s the full complement of ports you’d expect, including 5.1 3.5mm outputs for analogue surround sound, an optical S/PDIF output and a PS/2 mouse or keyboard port.

There’s plenty of room in the case for extra internal storage, as well as two externally facing 3 1/2in drive bays and a spare 5 1/4in bay. We’re not entirely happy with the position of the hard disk, as it’ll get in the way if you want to fit a long graphics card. It’s easy enough to move, though. The case doesn’t have much sound proofing, but there aren’t too many places for dust to get in and the PC runs quietly.

The system comes with a comfortable and very functional Logitech mouse and keyboard set, which were accurate and comfortable to use. The Philips 226V3L monitor is a 21.5in matt display with a resolution of 1,920×1,080. It looked a little cold, although it’s bright and blacks were deep. Sadly, it’s colour gamut wasn’t so good, with our colour calibrator reporting that it produced just 80.7 per cent of the RGB colour gamut. Given that the monitor is a £70 extra on the system’s £429 price, you can’t expect the highest quality and you may be better off buying a separate monitor later.

Overall, the Arbico AMD 588CS is a very capable all-round system, but it’s not as cheap as the PC Specialist Infinity A10 and can’t quite match the graphical power of the Wired2Fire Velocity VX.