PC Specialist Infinity A10 Pro Elite review

This PC was provided to us as a base PC system with a variety of internal and external upgrade options, contact the manufacturer to get the exact specification you require

The PC Specialist Infinity A10 Pro Elite can be bought with a variety of high-end upgrades, including a Blu-ray drive, powerful graphics card and extra RAM, but also exists as a cheap £449 base system. The system’s low price is helped by the decision to use an AMD A10-6800K processor instead of a recent Intel chip. While AMD’s CPUs are generally less powerful, they’re still more than adequate for many users’ needs.

The A10-6800K is also overclocked to 4.4GHz, and managed an overall score of 66 in our benchmarks when tested with the SSD upgrade in place; this dropped to 64 when we tested the system with a hard disk configured as the main system drive. This is slow by current desktop PC standards and is more around the kind of performance we see from a decent laptop. If you want to render plenty of high-definition video you should look elsewhere, but it’s still fine for most applications.

Although it only made a fairly minor improvement to our benchmarks, the £65 upgrade to a 120GB SSD is well worth having, as it also improves boot speeds, makes applications load more quickly and makes the PC feel more responsive. You can also equip the PC with a Blu-ray drive for £51. This is great if you’re into films and plan to use the PC for home entertainment, but otherwise you might as well stick with the supplied DVD-RW drive.

The PC’s ASUS F2A85-M motherboard is well equipped with SATA3 ports for storage upgrades, as there are seven on the board plus an eSATA3 port on the PC’s backplate. The backplate also has two USB3 ports, four USB ports, a PS/2 port, Gigabit Ethernet, an optical S/PDIF output and six 3.5mm stereo outputs for analogue surround sound. There are more ports on the case’s front panel: two USB ports, a USB3 port, the usual audio ports and a memory card reader.

The inside of the case is decked out with tool-less clips in unusually bright red plastic, as well as fans lit with blue LEDS. There’s a decent amount of space to work inside, with five 3 1/2in drive bays, four 5 1/4in bays and a dual-purpose external bay which contains the memory card reader. The system has four cooling fans, but despite all this airflow the PC wasn’t particularly noisy – we could only hear a slight rush of air.

The motherboard has four memory slots. Two are occupied by 4GB modules of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM, and you can upgrade to 16GB for an extra £60. Unless you do a lot of heavy-duty image or video editing, you probably won’t need that much RAM, though. If you’re looking to install expansion cards, the board is equipped with one PCI and one PCI-E x1 slot, as well as two PCI-E x16 slots. Unfortunately, the useful PCI-E x1 slot will be blocked by any graphics card that’s installed in the x16 slot above it.

The base specification version of this PC relies on the AMD A10-6800K processor’s integrated graphics. You won’t be able to run the latest 3D games at Full HD or high quality settings, but by reducing the resolution to 1,280×720 and High quality we got the frame rate up to 48.9fps. If you need a bit more gaming oomph than that, it’s well worth spending £115 to upgrade to a 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7870 graphics card. This gave us smoothly playable frame rates in both games at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra quality. In Dirt Showdown, we saw 73.7fps, and Crysis 2 ran smoothly at 33.9fps.

The monitor on offer is an AOC E2450swda, which is yours for an extra £110. It’s a matt 23.6in display with VGA and DVI inputs and a standard 1,920×1,080 resolution. Although it doesn’t suffer from any unwanted colour tints, it didn’t do particularly well when tested with our calibration tools, with a mediocre contrast ratio of 657:1 and a disappointing colour coverage of 79.3 per cent of the sRGB gamut.

The Infinity A10 Pro Elite is, in its £863 fully-upgraded form, a bit of a mixed bag; we’re not keen on the monitor and 16GB of RAM will be unnecessary for most, but the graphics card and Blu-ray drive upgrades are worth looking at. The system’s base specification is great value, giving you an extremely competent home PC for just £449. That alone earns it a Budget Buy award, but if you can afford to spend a bit extra, adding the graphics card turns it into a fully-fledged gaming PC for just £564, which is a bargain.