Eclipse Galaxy A10 R7-250 review

The A10 R7-250 combines one of AMD’s latest Kaveri processors with a dedicated graphics card that can be used to supplement the processor’s powerful integrated graphics in games.

The PC’s compact Antec case is surprisingly attractive for a budget model, with a plain black front panel that means the PC will fit in unobtrusively wherever you put it. Inside, the case couldn’t be simpler, with a plain metal interior and a single exhaust fan. All the internal edges are rolled and rounded off so the PC is easy to work on, and there’s room to install an intake fan behind the front panel should you need more cooling. The case’s thin chassis and perforated side panel don’t do much in terms of sound insulation, but the system isn’t very loud in the first place, with the noisiest component being the power supply fan.

If you don’t install a front fan, there’s around 350mm of space that lines up with the PCI-E graphics card slot. This means that you can get quite ambitious with any future graphics upgrades, with space for even the most powerful cards in the case. However, the 500W Alpine-branded PSU is essentially a generic model that you may want to upgrade before installing any particularly power-hungry components. The case has two internal 3 1/2in bays, one external one, and a couple of 5 1/4in drive bays. Currently, one 3 1/2in bay holds a 1TB hard disk, while a DVD-RW drive is installed in the topmost 5 1/4in bay.

Should you want to add extra storage, such as a super-fast SSD, there are four vacant SATA3 ports available on the PC’s Asus A88XM-A motherboard. The board also has four memory slots, two of which are in use, a PCI slot and both PCI-E x1 and x16 slots. However, as there’s a graphics card installed in the PCI-E x16 slot, you can’t get at the x1 slot below it. Two of the memory slots are occupied by 1,333MHz RAM modules. While we wouldn’t usually combine RAM of this speed with a Kaveri processor, as the on-chip graphics benefit from faster memory, the Galaxy’s dedicated graphics card means that this isn’t so much of a concern. We’re not very keen on the way Eclipse hot-glues all its components into place, but if and when you need to upgrade, it’s easy enough to pick the glue off with a bit of care.

The AMD A10-7700K CPU is installed with a stock cooler and runs at its default speed of 3.4GHz. In our application benchmarks, we saw an overall score of 67, which is exactly what we expect from this processor. It’s easily powerful enough to provide a smooth desktop experience and all the power you’ll need for day-to-day home computing. The graphics card is a 2GB AMD Radeon R7 250. This gave us a frame rate of 61.2fps in Dirt Showdown at 1,280×720 and High quality. Ultra quality and 1,920×1,080 wasn’t quite playable, though, with a frame rate of 25.1fps.

However, it’s worth noting that the 7700K CPU’s on-chip graphics are compatible with the R7 250 graphics card, and both can be linked using the AMD Dual Graphics standard. This wasn’t set up by default, but all we had to do to enable it was to select the on-chip GPU as our primary graphics device in the motherboard’s BIOS and connect our monitor to one of the motherboard’s graphics outputs. With that done, you can boot into Windows and control the Dual Graphics settings using Catalyst Control Centre. With AMD Dual Graphics turned on, we were able to run Dirt Showdown at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra quality at 36fps, making this a fairly capable gaming PC, particularly given its low price. We even saw a playable frame rate of 29.7fps in Crysis 3 at 1,920×1,080, admittedly by dropping the anti-aliasing to x1 and all other quality settings to Low, but it’s still impressive being able to play this hugely demanding game on a budget PC.