CyberPower Gamer Infinity Yang review

This month we took delivery of two new CyberPower Gamer Infinity PCs: Yin and Yang.

Both cost £549 and are supplied with the same peripherals. While the Yin has an AMD Phenom II processor and an ATI Radeon graphics card, the Yang uses an Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 processor and an Nvidia Geforce 9600 GT card.

The Yang's MSI P31 Neo V2 motherboard has the maximum 4GB of RAM installed, so there's no room for future upgrades. It has three empty PCI slots and a PCI-E x1 slot, although the latter is closer to the graphics card's fan than we'd like. The Yin has only a single accessible PCI slot but a freely available PCI-E x1 slot.

The Yang's selection of ports isn't that impressive, with no eSATA or FireWire. Bizarrely, it includes both parallel and serial ports. We don't know anyone who still uses these ports; a digital audio out would have been far more useful. The graphics card has one VGA and one DVI output. The latter will connect to the supplied Hanton H-341WDB 19in monitor. It's our favourite budget model, and won a Budget Buy award in our last monitors group test.

CyberPower has installed Vista Home Basic on the 500GB hard disks used in both PCs. This lacks the full feature set of Vista Home Premium. Because these PCs lack Microsoft's MPEG2 codec, the TV & Movies element of PCMark Vantage suffers badly. This is why both PCs scored well below average compared to the Home Premium models in our recent group test. In real terms, however, the lack of the codec won't affect day-to-day performance.

CyberPower has used a 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200, which costs around £40 more than the triple-core AMD Phenom II X3 710 in the Yin. Despite this, the two PCs had roughly equivalent overall scores in PCMark Vantage.

To make up for the disparity in processor prices, the Yang's Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT is cheaper than the Yin's ATI Radeon HD 4830. In Call of Duty 4 it scored respectably for a PC at this price, but the Yin is better suited for gaming.

In Chinese philosophy, Yin and Yang are meant to be complementary opposites. However, the Gamer Infinity Yang complements the Yin only by highlighting the latter's remarkable value. We don't see any reason why you'd want to buy this PC instead of the CyberPower Gamer Infinity Yin.