To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Arbico Elite 2556 CS review

Our Rating :
Price when reviewed : £999
inc VAT

Powerful enough to handle anything you throw at it, but we'd have preferred a larger monitor.

Specifications

4.6GHz Intel Core i5-2500K, 4GB RAM, 22in 1,920×1,080 display, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit

Arbico’s Elite 2556 CS comes in a case that, although distinctive, is a long way from being either pretty or subtle. It’s well ventilated, though, with front, side and rear case fans that are supplemented by a massive fan at the top of the chassis. Inside, it’s all bare grey metal, but all the edges are properly finished so it’s comfortable to work with. There are seven 3½in drive bays, one of which is occupied by a 1TB hard disk, and four 5¼in bays. Two of the latter house a memory card reader and a Blu-ray reader drive, which also writes DVDs.

Arbico Elite 2556 CS inside

The motherboard is an Asus P8P67 Pro, with two PCI slots, three PCI-E x16 slots and two PCI-E x1 slots. One of the x1 slots is blocked by the graphics card that sits in the top PCI-E x16 slot. There are eight SATA ports, four of which are SATA III. They’re all empty, but three of the SATA II ports are occupied. The PC has 4GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM in 2GB modules that occupy two of the four memory slots.

The processor is an overclocked Core i5-2500K, one of the most popular Sandy Bridge processors for performance systems. Arbico has ramped it up to 4.6GHz, producing an impressive score of 131 overall in our benchmarks. Other overclocked i5-2500K systems are even faster, but we have no complains about the amount of power the Elite can muster. Its graphics card is a 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti, powerful enough to give us some blistering frame rates in our 3D gaming tests. It averaged 63.7fps in Crysis and 48.7fps in STALKER – close to the scores we saw from similar systems with ATI Radeon HD 6950 graphics cards.

Arbico Elite 2556 CS rear ports

We were pleased to find a memory card reader that can handle a wide range of formats, from SDHC and microSD to cards used by some older digital cameras, such as CompactFlash, Memory Stick and xD. The card reader also has a USB port, bringing the total number of front USB ports up to four. At the back of the PC are another ten USB ports, including four USB3 ports. There’s also a Firewire port and two eSATA III ports. The motherboard also has a couple of PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, six 3.5mm stereo audio ports and both co-axial and optical S/PDIF. We can’t think of any PC we’ve seen with more potential for connecting external storage, peripherals and other devices.

Pages: 1 2

Basic Specifications

Rating ***
Processor Intel Core i5-2500K
Processor external bus 100MHz (Sandy Bridge DMI)
Processor multiplier x46
Processor clock speed 4.6GHz
Processor socket LGA1155
Memory 4
Memory type PC3-12800
Maximum memory 32GB
Motherboard Asus P8P67 Pro
Motherboard chipset Intel P67

Ports

USB2 ports (front/rear) 4/10
Firewire ports (front/rear) 0/1
eSATA ports (front/rear) 0/2
Wired network ports 1x 10/100/1000
Wireless networking support none

Internal Expansion

Case midi tower
PCI-E x1 slots (free) 2 (1)
PCI-E x16 slots (free) 3 (2)
Free Serial ATA ports 5
Free memory slots 2
Free 3.5in drive bays 6

Hard Disk

Hard disk model(s) Samsung HD103SJ
Interface SATA2
Total storage capacity 1,000GB

Graphics

Graphics card(s) 1GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti
Graphics/video ports 2x DVI, 1x HDMI

Sound

Sound Realtek ALC892
Sound outputs 7.1 line out, coaxial S/PDIF out, optical S/PDIF out, stereo line out, mic in
Speakers none

Removable Drives

Supported memory cards SD, SDHC, microSD, CF, Memory Stick PRO Duo, MMC, Micro Drive, xD
Optical drive type(s) DVD+/-RW +/-DL BD-ROM

Display

Viewable size 22 in
Screen model LG Flatron E2260
Native resolution 1,920×1,080
Screen inputs VGA, DVI, HDMI

Other Hardware

Keyboard Logitech MK250
Mouse Logitech MK250

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 £999
Details www.arbico.co.uk

Read more

Reviews