Arbico Phenom 9670XL review

With the Phenom 9670XL, Arbico has put together a very respectable system that uses AMD’s 3.4GHz quad-core Phenom II X4 965 processor, 4GB of RAM and a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5770. They’re all decent choices of component and make for a powerful computer.

This can be seen in the PC’s benchmark results. An overall score of 97 is quick, and only slightly behind our reference Phenom II x4 920 PC; it’s a fair way off the pace set by Core i3 and Core i5-based computers, although it’s fair to say that this PC will still cope with any task.

Graphics performance is fantastic, thanks to the Radeon HD 5770, our current favourite graphics card. It managed 69.4fps in our Call of Duty 4 test and 32.1fps in our Crysis test. It’s a fast card that’s capable of dealing with any modern games. If you’re a real games fan you can use the card’s Eyefinity mode to drive up to three monitors, although you have to use the DisplayPort output as one of the three.

The graphics card is more than capable at driving games at the 22in AOC 2219Vwa monitor’s native resolution of 1,680×1,050. We’d have preferred a 1,920×1,080 monitor at this price, but the screen still has plenty of desktop space. Unfortunately, the quality of the monitor left a lot to be desired. Colours are accurate when you sit straight on, but move slightly to the side and the screen takes on a pink tint, due to poor viewing angles. DVI and VGA inputs let you connect two computers. The DVI port is HDCP compliant, so you can use with an HDMI adaptor to plug in another device, such as a Blu-ray player.

Arbico has used an excellent case, both in terms of its appearance and build quality. Don’t get caught out by the FireWire port on the front, as it’s not connected as the motherboard doesn’t support the technology. We found that the PC was very quiet and only a gentle whine of the cooling fans exists. Inside, you’ll find plenty of room to upgrade. The Asrock K10N78 motherboard three free PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots, although one of these is blocked by the graphics cards. Two memory slots are free, and the motherboard can take up to 16GB of RAM in total, which the supplied copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit can use in its entirety.

A 500GB hard disk is what we’d expect at this price and provides plenty of storage space. There’s plenty of upgrade potential with three spare 5.25in and six spare 3.5in drive bays, and four spare SATA ports. However, you may want to use one of the 3.25in drive bays for a memory card reader as none is supplied.

When the system reached us, it wasn’t configured to use S3 power saving, so using Windows’ power-saving mode used full power. While full production PCs should go out correctly configured, it’s worth checking the BIOS setting.

Arbico’s Phenom 9670XL is a decent, well-built computer, but its poor monitor lets it down, and it can’t compete performance wise with Yoyotech’s Warbird i650cs.