CyberPower Infinity i5 Silent Edition review

Following Intel’s announcement of a flaw in the SATA ports of its Sandy Bridge chipset, we’d recommend holding off buying any such PC until the issue is resolved

CyberPower’s heavily overclocked Infinity i5 Silent Edition is the first PC we’ve reviewed that uses one of Intel’s new Sandy Bridge Core i5 processors and the LGA1155 socket. Like the last couple of Intel core releases, this combination is expected to prompt a major shake-up among system builders.

The Infinity’s performance was everything we’d hoped for. It clocked up the highest Overall score we’ve ever seen, a whopping 219. Its video encoding test score of 246 was also staggeringly high. Essentially, in terms of performance the Infinity i5 Silent Edition jumps up and down on top of every other PC we’ve ever reviewed. Now we’ve established that we’re dealing with a stunning piece of hardware, let’s take a look at what the rest of the system has to offer. After all, even a powerful overclocked processor has only limited uses without other high-end hardware to support it.

Fortunately, CyberPower hasn’t skimped here, either. The PC comes equipped with a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 graphics card, which produced some very credible frame rates in our gaming tests. We got 64fps in the aging Call of Duty 4, while our more graphically intensive tests produced rates of 29.7fps in Crysis and 28.2fps in our new STALKER sun shafts tests. This is by no means the best gaming graphics card around, but it should certainly be able to handle all the latest titles with little or no reduction of quality.

There’s not much else in the PC – just a 1TB hard disk, DVD-RW drive and 4GB of DDR3 memory with a maximum speed of 1600MHz. You can install up to 32GB of memory, although anything above 8GB is overkill and the current 4GB should be more than adequate for most tasks.