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The Arbico Elite OC3556 CS looks a bit drab, but its sturdy and doesnt flex easily. It doesnt have much dust-proofing, having large vent holes at the top, bottom and sides of the case. The many vents mean there isnt much sound proofing, but all the fans in the system are remarkably quiet.
We like the smoothly sliding drive rails on the cases four internal 3 1/2in drive bays. Theres also an external 3½in bay, which can be used as a sixth 5 1/4in bay if you remove a secondary drive tray thats screwed into it. Just one of the five standard 5 1/4in bays is occupied, so youre unlikely to need the extra space. Of the total six bays, a SATA2 port connects the optical drive and both SATA3 ports are used by the hard disks.
The system drive is a 128GB SSD, so you get the fast boot times you expect from a high-end modern PC. It gives you plenty of space to install any applications that are likely to benefit from the faster read-write speeds of an SSD. For less critical applications and for general data storage, Arbico has provided a 1TB HDD.
Although theres plenty of room for extra disk drives, theres no room to add extra memory. Dont panic, though. The Asus P8Z77-V LX motherboard can handle up to 32GB of RAM, but its highly unlikely youll ever need more than the generous 16GB of memory with which the PCs already equipped. The CPU is an Intel Core i5-3570K, our favourite Ivy Bridge processor, and its well suited to overclocking. In this case, Arbico has overclocked the CPU to 4.4GHz, producing an overall score of 141 in our tests.
Theres a fair bit of scope for adding expansion cards too, with three vacant PCI slots and two PCI-E x1 slots. One of the latter is blocked by the graphics card, but theres a second PCI-E x16 slot which actually runs at x4 and is appropriate for use with any PCI-E x1 card. The graphics card is an overclocked Asus version of Nvidias GeForce GTX 560 Ti card. It wasnt quite up to producing a comfortably smooth frame rate in Crysis 2 at its maximum quality settings, averaging 24fps, but it averaged 50.6fps in Dirt 3. It has two DVI and a Mini HDMI outputs.
The system has just eight USB ports in total: two on the front panel and six at the back. Two of the rear ports are USB3. Theres also a PS/2 port, an optical S/PDIF output, three 3.5mm stereo outputs for analogue surround sound and a Gigabit Ethernet port. On the front, are 3.5mm microphone and headphone ports.
The system comes with a Logitech MK260 wireless keyboard and mouse set. Weve seen a lot of these from OEMs and theyre certainly an inoffensive choice. The keyboard is slightly spongy and the ambidextrous mouse is a bit small, but its a good set. The monitor is an AOC E2450SWDA. Its a matt 23.6in widescreen display with DVI and VGA inputs and a Full HD resolution. Its controls are fiddly and options are few, but we were pleased with its even backlighting and natural, balanced colours.
Although the Elite OC3556 CS uses the same components as many similarly priced systems on the market, the GTX 560 Ti graphics card is a little underpowered. Gamers will be better off with the Wired2Fire Diablo GTX or the excellent Chillblast Fusion Vantage.
