Arbico Haswell 4670Ti review

This PC was provided to us as a base PC system with a variety of internal and external upgrade options, contact the manufacturer to get the exact specification you require

The Arbico Haswell 4670Ti is a rather powerful PC even in its £701 base configuration, but you can further improve its performance with a variety of optional components and peripherals. We’ve reviewed a selection, including an SSD, monitor and Blu-ray drive, which all together bring the price of the PC up to £911.

The rather snazzy black case is well made, although the large fan mounts take up space which would normally be used for sound- or dust-proofing. Fortunately, the case’s blue-lit fans don’t make much noise, even if you’re hammering the processor or graphics card. There are four 3 1/2in bays and six 5 1/4in bays, and the larger bays can be reconfigured to take smaller drives. One 5 1/4in drive bay has an adaptor so it can be fitted with 3 1/2in devices, such as a memory card reader or even a floppy drive.

The PC is equipped with an MSI Z87-G41 motherboard and Intel Core i5-4670 processor. Although the processor isn’t unlocked, and so can’t be easily overclocked, it’s still massively powerful and achieved an overall score of 115 in our benchmark tests. The motherboard has four memory slots, of which two are occupied by 1,600MHz modules of DDR3 RAM. Arbico offers an upgrade to 16GB RAM for £70, which is reasonable, but you’ll really only want this much RAM if you’re editing large numbers of huge images at once or running several virtual machines.

There are two PCI-E x16 slots, one of which actually runs at x4, two PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots. The manufacturer’s specifications claim the Z87-G41 has been designed with a gap below the upper PCI Express x16 slot, so you can fit a graphics card without blocking an expansion slot below it. However, we found this wasn’t the case, and a dual-slot graphics card would still obscure the slot below the PCI Express slot. The motherboard has six SATA3 ports, so there’s plenty of scope to connect extra storage.

The PC’s base spec includes a 1TB hard disk, but an extra £75 will get you a 120GB SSD system drive in addition to the HDD. The SSD will make the PC boot more quickly, as well as making applications load faster and Windows feel generally more responsive. There’s also the option to upgrade the DVD-RW drive to a Blu-ray reader/DVD writer combo for £35, which is well worth doing if you want to use the system for home entertainment.

Arbico didn’t offer a graphics card upgrade with this review system, but the standard model is a decent card. It’s a 1GB Nvidia GTX 650 Ti, which managed a playable frame rate of 31.3fps in Crysis 2 at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra quality. Unfortunately, a driver compatibility problem meant that we were unable to run our Dirt Showdown test, but the Crysis 2 score shows that this is still a capable graphics card for demanding games. The card has two DVI ports, a VGA port and a Mini HDMI port for various monitor configurations.

The motherboard’s back plate gives you a pair of PS/2 ports for connecting a mouse and keyboard, four USB ports, two USB3 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port and three 3.5mm stereo ports for up to 5.1 analogue surround sound. On the case’s front panel are two USB ports and the usual mic and headphone ports.

For £80 Arbico will supply a 21.5in AOC e2250Swdn monitor with this PC, with VGA and DVI inputs. Unfortunately, it’s not a brilliant display. The e2250Swdn suffers from poor contrast that makes dark scenes look greyish and murky, and didn’t do well in our colour coverage test, either, where it could only display 79.8% of the sRGB colour gamut. The screen is fine for standard desktop use, but far from impressive. It’s a cheap screen, but we’d recommend saving up for something better, such as the Budget Buy-winning AOC E2462VWH.