Arbico Haswell 4160Ti

Arbico’s Haswell 4160Ti desktop is not a very ambitious system and falls short in multiple areas. It comes in a plain CIT case that’s often seen with lower-end PCs. The front panel has a honeycomb design, which means there are plenty of tiny gaps from which the noise of the single case fan and power supply fan can be heard. It’s not distractingly loud, but there is a constant audible hum coming from the machine. This doesn’t increase a great deal when under load, which is a relief.

There are two USB ports on the front of the case, but neither of these are USB3-compatible, which is a bit of an oversight particularly when you consider that almost every other PC in this price bracket will have at least one, if not two, high-speed connectors for USB storage devices. This also means that the USB3 header on the motherboard is going to waste, as there is capacity for an extra two USB3 ports in addition to the two found at the rear of the machine. Round the back you’ll also find a further four USB2 connectors and three 3.5mm audio jacks.

The dual-core Intel Core i3-4160 processor runs at a maximum clock speed of 3.6GHz. This translates into decent single-core benchmarking scores, but as the benchmarks get tougher, its scores get progressively worse. It scored 98 in the image rendering task, 67 in video conversion and 64 when multitasking, making for an overall score of 71. That’s still faster than your average laptop, but way off the pace of other PCs at this price.

With a fairly cheap processor, we would have expected Arbico to up its game when it comes to the graphics card, but on the inside of the Haswell 4160Ti there’s only a mid-range Nvidia GeForce GTX 750Ti. This chip is good enough to run most of the latest games well at Full-HD resolutions, but struggles with the extra eyecandy such as anti-aliasing and advanced lighting effects. It performed well in our Dirt Showdown benchmark, producing an average of 58fps when running at 1,920×1,080 pixel resolution and Ultra settings.

Things weren’t quite so smooth with Crysis 3, which stuttered to an average frame rate of 29.3fps when running on High settings. We dropped the settings to Medium and reduced anti-aliasing from 4x to 2x, and this improved performance to a much smoother 44.4fps. Considering that other £700 PCs we’ve reviewed manage to include both a better processor and higher performance GPUs, you can get better gaming performance elsewhere.

There is some room for expansion: the case is big enough for a longer graphics card and there are two spare slots for extra RAM modules to be added at a later date. The MSI B85M-E45 motherboard also has one spare SATA3 connector for extra storage and another two SATA2 ports if the included storage isn’t generous enough for your liking. We were happy to see both a 120GB SSD and a 1TB hard disk making the cut here; this combination is an effective blend of performance and capacity. There is one free PCI-E x1 slot and a legacy PCI slot as well. A second PCI-E x1 slot is obstructed by the graphics card.

Perhaps the strongest suit of this PC is the inclusion of a decent, albeit cheap, AOC E2495S monitor. This 24in screen uses TN technology, but actually performed reasonably well in our tests. It can accurately display 91 per cent of the sRGB colour gamut and also has a fairly high 1065:1 contrast ratio. Viewing angles are fairly wide, and it has VGA and two HDMI connectors to connect to other devices if you wish. The graphics card on the PC is slightly set into the case, which makes it hard to connect some HDMI cables to the graphics card; our standard cable didn’t make the cut. Luckily, the graphics card has slightly more accessible VGA and DVI ports.

The Logitech MK120 keyboard and mouse set supplied with the PC is one we’ve seen many times before. It’s cheap and relatively cheerful, but if you’re going to be spending a lot of time typing or gaming, we’d suggest upgrading.

Overall, the Arbico Haswell 4160Ti isn’t the best choice if you’re looking to spend £700 on a complete system. The processor is fairly anaemic and we’ve seen more powerful graphics cards in identically priced systems, meaning that there aren’t many redeeming qualities for this PC in such a competitive price bracket. The good quality monitor is a plus point, but it doesn’t make up for the rest of the machine.