CyberPower Infinity X88 GTX review: A true powerhouse of a PC
A formidable price, but just look at what's inside: the Infinity X88 GTX is a beastly gaming PC
Pros
- Practical InWin case
- Impressive performance
- Packed with star components
Cons
- High quality comes at a cost
- Palicomp i7 Nebula is £50 cheaper
- Not a lot of potential for internal expansion
The Infinity X88 GTX is a very expensive PC. However, this is no average Core i7 CPU, but a watercooled 8700K with its six cores overclocked to hit a peak 4.8GHz. The MSI GTX 1080 Aero graphics card packs 8GB of 10,010MHz GDDR5 RAM. Throw in 16GB of 3,000MHz DDR4 RAM and a 256GB WD Black M.2 NVMe drive, and you have a system designed to burn through the most demanding applications or 3D games.
CyberPower Infinity X88 GTX review: Performance
And so it does. The CyberPower runs Rise of the Tomb Raider at a 4K resolution 4fps faster than anything else and matches the similarly specified Palicomp i7 Nebula in Metro: Last Light. Any way you look at it, this is a seriously powerful PC.
It’s also cool and quiet, with the CoolerMaster watercooling system shifting heat from the CPU through to a chunky radiator with fans venting downwards at the bottom of the InWin case. However hard we pushed the Infinity, CPU temperatures never drifted above 64°C and actually stayed south of 40°C much of the time.
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CyberPower Infinity X88 GTX review: Features
That InWin case is large but practical, with a 120mm fan and a lot of space for airflow over the non-watercooled components. It’s a joy to work inside, with excellent cable management and two easily accessible 3.5in drive bays attached to the power-supply compartment at the top.
One of these is occupied by a 2TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk, while the other sits ready to be filled with a second 6GB/sec SATA drive. This gives you the capacity for images, audio, video and game files, while the M.2 drive delivers the performance these demanding applications need.
You can get to all this stuff with ease through the tempered glass slide panel, which has two click-and-clip pins that hold it securely in place. These feel a little cheap, but you can unclip the panel in a couple of seconds – something that can’t be said for the average four-screw effort.
There’s not a lot of lighting inside or around the casing – just a small glow on the waterblock, a glowing MSI logo and red illumination on the Perspex InWin logo, but that’s fine with us.
Beyond storage, there’s not a whole lot of internal expansion potential. You can add two more DIMMs to the existing two 8GB Adata XPG modules or maybe sandwich a PCIe 3.0 x1 card in between the GPU and the radiator, but you’re going to find the latter a struggle. Still, given the supplied specification, that’s hardly a big deal.
While connectivity isn’t anything special, it’s good to see six USB 3.1 ports, including two you can get to quickly on the top of the case near the front, alongside microphone and headphone sockets. Plug your mouse and keyboard into the two USB 2 ports and you’ve still got plenty of room for external hard disks or a VR headset.
The system comes pre-overclocked, but the Asus UEFI BIOS gives you plenty of options to tweak clock speeds and voltages – not to mention full control over the watercooling system and some nice automated tuning features. We’d stick to the existing settings, but it’s nice to know that, if you need it, you could still eke out an extra boost.
CyberPower Infinity X88 GTX review: Verdict
All in all, this is an extremely impressive system, ready to run any games and applications you want to throw at it for a good few years. The only thing that spoils CyberPower’s party is the Palicomp i7 Nebula, which gives you a very similar specification for £50 less.
The Palicomp has faster storage, giving it the edge on the Infinity X88, but don’t discount the CyberPower – it’s a mightily impressive piece of kit.