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Arbico typically makes high-quality PCs with great build quality, but the small firm often struggles to get the prices of its systems down far enough to match its rivals. However, the Elite 3578 CS is a bold attempt. The PC is equipped with an Intel Core i5-3570K processor, running at its native 3.4GHz. Even without any overclocking, it’s powerful enough for an overall score of 121 in our application benchmarks, can still cope with intensive tasks. Because this is an unlocked processor, you can overclock it yourself if you want to, although it would be a good idea to swap the stock Intel cooler for something a bit more chunky.
The MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard has a clear mouse-driven UEFI interface to help you change settings. It also has loads of upgrade potential. There aren’t any PCI slots – the standard is slowly being superseded by PCI-Express – but there are four PCI-E x1 slots (one of which is blocked by the graphics card) and three PCI-E x16 slots. One x16 slot is occupied by the graphics card, and the remaining two run at x16 and x4. The presence of a second full-speed PCI-E x16 slot makes this system a good choice if you want to experiment with dual-graphics-card setups – the board is certified for AMD’s CrossFire X, but not SLI.
Installed in the top PCI-E x16 slot is an AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card with 1GB of memory. It has plenty of gaming power, as shown by a smoothly playable average frame rate of 29.2fps when running Crysis 2 at 1,920×1,080 and Ultra quality. This card is powerful enough to keep gamers happy for a significant period of time. The graphics card has DVI, HDMI and two mini DisplayPort outputs, which you can use to connect up to three monitors.
The motherboard can handle up to 32GB of RAM. Currently, two 4GB modules are installed, running at 1,600MHz. 8GB is plenty for modern applications and typical for a PC in this price range. The board also has six SATA ports, two of which are SATA3. Both of these are in use, connected to an SSD system disk and a 1TB HDD for storage. The DVD-RW drive is connected to a SATA2 port.
Unfortunately, the SSD, although it means that you get incredibly fast boot and access speeds, has only 60GB capacity, and there’s only 20GB free. We’ve installed games – which would also benefit from the fast read/write speeds of an SSD – larger than this, so you’ll have to be prepared to change the default installation location of games and applications to your mechanical hard disk.
There’s plenty of room to install extra drives, fortunately, with five vacant 3 1/2in bays, including an external bay that can take either 5 1/4in or 3 1/2in drives. There are also two more vacant external 5 1/4in bays. On the front panel are two USB ports and 3.5mm headphone and mic ports. At the back of the motherboard you’ll find another six USB ports, two of them USB3. There’s also a PS/2 port, both optical and coaxial S/PDIF outputs, 7.1 analogue surround sound outputs and a Gigabit Ethernet port.
The supplied mouse and keyboard are budget Logitech wireless models – comfortable to use, if made of rather cheap plastic. The monitor is a Philips 226V3L. It’s only a 21.5in widescreen display, rather than the more common 23.6in models, and doesn’t have an HDMI input, but we were pleased with its accurate colours and wide viewing angles.
This is a carefully built PC with an excellent selection of components. The lack of overclocking means it’s not as quick as it could be, but it also means you don’t have a huge CPU cooler, and the Core i5-3570K processor is very powerful even at its standard settings. The motherboard also makes it easy to make your own speed tweaks in the future. Our only real issue is with the tiny 60GB SSD boot disk. We’d gladly pay a little more for a 120GB disk, which would provide at least a bit of space to install complicated programs which benefit from fast access speeds. The monitor is also rather small, but its image quality helps to compensate. This is a good computer, but it needs a few tweaks to bring it up to speed when compared to systems like the award-winning Chillblast Fusion Blaze.
