Cyberpower 8400/9600 PC review

Cyberpower are known for producing affordable PCs that are ready for today's most demanding games and applications.

True to form, two of the most vital components in this machine are brand new parts. (We've named it after them, since at the time of writing the PC was so new it didn't have a title.) The processor is an Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, a 3GHz unit produced using a new 45 nanometre architecture, which in English means the bits inside are squashed closer together, increasing efficiency and reducing heat. Consequently, the heatsink required is tiny - about a third of the size of a standard Intel heatsink - which leaves a lot more free space inside the PC's case.

The other major new component is the graphics card, an nVidia GeForce 9600GT, which has just been introduced to replace the mid-range 8600GT. The combination of these two components, along with 2GB of memory, ensured that our performance tests were dispatched with haste. A score of 217% in the general (2D) benchmark was matched by 3D gaming capability as the Cyberpower earned itself a score of 218 by running Call of Duty 2, with our usual demanding settings, at an average of 64 frames per second.

Something's gotta give

You might think some compromises would be inevitable in a system that incorporates both of these excellent new parts and yet comes in at just £550. And a look at the monitor would confirm these suspicions. Made by Hanoi, it's a 19 incher - a reasonable size, but significantly smaller than the 22 inch units we often see - and its image quality is poor. Text didn't look sharp, edges weren't well defined, and colour fidelity was merely average, with a slight pink hue in white tones and a paleness seeping into everything else. It's rather ugly, too, with the silver of the monitor doing little to complement the PC case, which is mostly black.

Some cheese-paring is also evident within the machine itself. For all its stylish good looks, the case is almost comically empty: the motherboard is adorned with that tiny heatsink, the graphics card, RAM, and not much else. With seven 3.5 inch bays, only one filled with a less than generous 160GB hard disk, there's certainly plenty of room for expansion. We did note that the relatively few wires connecting the installed components had been tied together and neatly arranged out of the way, which says a lot about the way Cyberpower puts its systems together.

Outside, the accessory drought continues. A standard Logitech USB keyboard and mouse will do a basic job, but nothing more. The DVD writer, too, is relatively basic, and there's no fancy sound card to please serious gamers.

But no corners have been cut on the essentials. There's a decent range of connections, including eight USB ports, plenty of audio jacks, FireWire, and an S/PDIF digital audio output. If you don't fancy fiddling with internal drives, you can add a fast external hard disk using the eSATA port.

The Cyberpower is a PC of two halves, if you like. The blistering processor will cope easily with any application. The sparkly new graphics card - while it may be replacing an older mid-range model - is supremely powerful, roughly on a par with the recently released 8800GS. But to get a really satisfactory system, you'd ideally want to opt for a better monitor, bigger hard disk, and maybe a nicer mouse and keyboard - all of which Cybperower can supply, at a price.

For £550, though, what you get is pure, unadulterated performance. Where you want to take it from there is up to you.