CyberPower Gamer Infinity Yin review

CyberPower's Gamer Infinity Yin uses the new AMD Phenom II X3 710 processor plus an ATI Radeon HD 4830 graphics card, our current Best Buy card.

You might be surprised to learn that an X3 710 is simply an X4 920 in which one of the four cores had a manufacturing defect. By simply disabling the faulty core, AMD can sell a fast triple-core processor at a bargain price.

Putting to one side the benchmark issues relating to Windows Vista Home Basic, the Yin manages to outperform all but one of the £650 PCs in our last group test. This continues to demonstrate that AMD has the advantage over Intel when it comes to budget desktop PCs. In our 3D games benchmarks, the Yin's score of 23.1fps in our Crysis test is remarkable for a computer at this price.

The Yin has a great selection of ports, with eSATA, FireWire and an optical S/PDIF output. There are also eight USB ports in total. Internal expansion is limited to one accessible PCI slot and one PCI-E x1 slot. CyberPower has used the 64-bit version of Vista in both this and the Yang, so the 4GB of RAM fitted can be fully utilised. It's also possible to add another 4GB of RAM if required.

The Yin's CoolerMaster case looks smart, and there's plenty of room inside for extra disks and optical drives. There's a red fluorescent strip light at the bottom of the case, and the fans have small red LEDs in each corner. Although this strikes us as slightly garish, we know that some people like the extra character it brings to an otherwise bland PC. The keyboard and mouse are basic, but perfectly usable. There are no speakers supplied with this PC, so we recommend Logitech's X-230s.

Our Best Buy-winning £500 Mesh Nero 9850HD doesn't have a dedicated graphics card for gaming, but it trumps the Yin by virtue of its 22in Iiyama monitor. It may not be as large, but it's worth noting that the Yin's Hanton H-341WDB 19in monitor has excellent image quality and won our Budget Buy award.

As a gaming PC, the Yin is great value for money, and so deserves it own Budget Buy award. However, if you don't intend to play games, then Mesh's Nero 9850HD is a better choice for day-to-day computing, and you'll save yourself £50 as well.

Author: Barry de la Rosa