CyberPower Gamer Infinity Xfire GT Pro review

With a title as long as that you'd hope for a lot from this PC, and indeed you do get quite a bit.

It's part of CyberPower's Hi-Performance Gaming range, and while there may be two letters chopped off a word there, there's no shortage of stuff inside the dominating case to keep performance-hungry users satisfied.

At the heart of the system is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor. It's one of the new Core 2 Duos, with a faster front side bus (FSB) than models not ending in '50'. The FSB is the path along which data passes between the processor and the rest of the PC, so lots of speed here is reassuring, as is the speed of the processor itself, a hefty 2.66GHz. That's pretty near the top of the pile for Core 2 Duos, so you can't ask for much more in the processing department.

Of course, processing power is nothing without a decent supporting cast of other components, and here again the Xfire GT Pro delivers. There's 2GB of memory (RAM) to keep Vista Home Premium happy and let you run several applications at once without struggling. CyberPower has also squeezed extra performance from the two hard disks it's installed by combining them in a RAID array. RAID stands for 'redundant array of independent devices' (or 'inexpensive drives', according to which geek you ask). 'Redundant' doesn't mean the whole thing is pointless, but that if one device fails the whole system won't come down, an important consideration in the world of servers, where RAID comes from.

Disk doubler

Since ordinary users don't like paying twice for their storage just for an extra bit of reassurance, RAID has evolved to provide different flavours, with the option of using multiple disks to boost speed instead of reliability. Using one disk to back up the other would be a 'mirrored' array, or RAID 0. Another method actively uses two hard disks simultaneously, splitting disk reads and writes evenly between them in the hope that halving the workload for each disk will boost performance. This is a 'striped' array, or RAID 1; data is said to be striped across the disks. It usually gives a bit of a performance boost, but disks these days tend to be very fast anyway, especially if they're SATA 2-compatible. Any RAID array needs to be made from identical disks, and Windows will then see them as one storage device. So, even though this PC has two 250MB disks, you'll see one 500GB drive in Windows. We'd rather CyberPower had just used one disk, as the inherent danger with a striped RAID array, ironically, is that you double the chance of disk failure - and therefore data loss - for questionable performance gains.

How much RAID contributed to the high 2D benchmark score is hard to say, but it's easy to tell where the 3D performance comes from: the huge red graphics card that dominates the internals. It's an ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT, the flagship of ATI's new family of DirectX 10 cards. The specs are a gamer's dream, with 320 stream processors running at 740MHz and a huge 1GB of memory all of its own.

However, a game needs to be programmed to use that 1GB of video memory, and most just aren't. Besides, it's the stream processors that handle the calculations that make 3D games look gorgeous while still running smoothly. As such, it's interesting to compare how many calculations this card can do per second with a card at the top of rival nVidia's current family. You can see what we discovered below. To cut a long story short, gaming performance could have been better - but it's still very good.