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Arbico OC 7600 XL review

Arbico OC 7600 XL
Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £750
inc VAT

Arbico has concentrated on making the OC 7600 XL as fast as possible, but has neglected the hard disk, graphics card and monitor in the process.

Specifications

3.66GHz Intel Core i5-760, 4GB RAM, 22in 1,920×1,080 display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Arbico’s OC 7600 XL is an overclocked monster, with an Intel Core i5-760 running at 3.66GHz (up from its stock speed of 2.8). This may not seem like a big increase, but its scores in our benchmarks were similar to Core i7 chips that cost hundreds of pounds more. It did especially well in our video-encoding test, scoring 179; this makes it well-suited to video encoding and 3D rendering applications.

Sadly, Arbico seems to have put all its eggs in one basket. Relatively speaking, it has spent little on the monitor, graphics card and other components and it’s one of the only £750 PCs we’ve seen with a 500GB rather than a 1TB hard disk. Even the keyboard and mouse set are the cheapest models here, and look horribly tacky next to the budget Microsoft and Logitech sets provided by other manufacturers.

Arbico has opted for an HKC 22in monitor. Its image quality is awful, with a dark, uneven backlight, and a strong blue cast that makes the image look cold. The menu system is crude and ugly, with only basic colour adjustments that did little to improve colour accuracy. We’d strongly advise dropping the monitor and putting the £95 you save towards a better monitor, such as the BenQ G2222HDL.

Arbico OC 7600 XL

We’d expect to get a muscular graphics card with our £750, so we were slightly disappointed with the ATI Radeon HD 5750 fitted to the OC 7600 XL. It scored 59.8 fps in Call of Duty 4 and 27.5fps in Crysis. Both are respectable scores but less than we’d expect for this price. At the monitor’s native, Full HD resolution, you’d have to turn anti-aliasing off to get a playable frame rate in Crysis. It’s also worth noting that the card lacks a VGA port, and Arbico failed to include a DVI cable in the box.

Elsewhere, Arbico’s choice of components is better: the Asus P7P55D-E motherboard includes USB3 and SATA III and plenty of expansion card slots. There’s a free PCI-E x16 slot, so you could potentially link another ATI 5750 graphics card, but the small improvement this gives means this slot is probably better thought of as for extra expansion. The two SATA III headers are only useful if you plan to add a solid state disk (SSD), as mechanical hard disks can’t take advantage of the increased throughput speeds SATA III offers.

Externally, you get two USB3 ports to complement the eight standard USB ports, and there’s also FireWire and eSATA, so you have great flexibility in your choice of external drive interfaces. Audio can be output via the 7.1 line out ports, optical S/PDIF, or via the graphics card’s HDMI output.

It’s a shame that Arbico didn’t provide a better quality keyboard and mouse. The keyboard looks and feels awful. Its flat keys are wobbly and have no feedback. The mouse’s see-through design is tacky, and it’s far too small.

If you absolutely need as much multi-core processing power as possible, you could justify buying the OC 7600 XL without the monitor for £655; for most people, this much performance isn’t necessary, and you’ll be compromising in other areas. Eclipse’s Solar i76r577 is far better value: although it’s not overclocked, it has a far better graphics card and monitor, and twice the storage space.

Basic Specifications

Rating **
Processor Intel Core i5-760
Processor external bus 175MHz (3.1GHz DMI)
Processor multiplier x21
Processor clock speed 3.66GHz
Processor socket LGA1156
Level 1 cache 4x 64KB
Level 2 cache 4x 256KB
Memory 4
Memory type DDR3
Maximum memory 16GB
Motherboard Asustek P7P55D-E
Motherboard chipset Intel P55

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 2/6
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/1
eSATA ports (front/rear) 0/1
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support none
Other ports 2x USB 3.0

Internal Expansion

Case tower
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 3 (2)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 2 (1)
Free Serial ATA ports 6
Free memory slots 2
Free 3.5in drive bays 6

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Samsung SpinPoint F3 HD502HJ
Interface SATA II, SATA III
Total storage capacity 500GB
Spindle speed 7,200rpm

Graphics

Graphics card(s) ATI Radeon HD 5750
Graphics/video ports 2x DVI, HDMI, DisplayPort

Sound

Sound VIA HD Audio
Sound outputs 7.1 line out, optical S/PDIF out
Speakers none

Removable Drives

3.5in floppy drive no
Supported memory cards none
Optical drive model Optiarc AD-5260S
Optical drive type(s) DVD+/-RW +/-DL

Display

Viewable size 22 in
Screen model HKC 2219A
Native resolution 1,920×1,080
Response time 5ms
Screen inputs VGA, DVI

Other Hardware

Modem No
Keyboard Sumvision Achillies
Mouse Sumvision optical mouse

Software

Software included none
Operating system Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
Operating system restore option Windows disc

Buying Information

Warranty two years RTB
Price £750
Details www.arbico.co.uk

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