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Arbico’s eXcel i2561 CS is housed in a plain, black Gigabyte case that failed to quicken our pulse. The same can’t be said of the monitor: a 24in AOC model with a bright, even LED backlight and natural-looking colours. It even has a reasonable pair of speakers built in.
Inside the case we found an Intel Core i5-2500, which is unusual for an Intel chip as it doesn’t support Hyper-Threading. However, it has four physical cores so it ploughed through our new benchmarks with ease, scoring 99 overall. This is reassuring as it matched our reference PC which has an almost identical i5-2500K chip (the “K” variant is unlocked for overclocking). Along with a staple 4GB of RAM, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an application that will slow the eXcel i2561 CS down.
Like many budget PCs, the eXcel i2561 CS doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card, relying instead on the Core i5’s integrated Intel HD Graphics chipset. This struggled to play any of our benchmark games, even with low quality settings, but older games may run. The dedicated chip is capable of decoding HD video, and there’s an HDMI output that you can feed to a home cinema system.
If you’d like to play games, there are two free PCI-E x16 slots for upgrades. Just bear in mind that the 500W power supply may not be able to handle some of the more powerful cards, even though there’s room in the case for them. This room comes at the expense of hard disk trays: there’s room for only one extra internal disk. You could always use the two external bays, but with more than two hard disks another problem rears its head: heat. There’s just one fan, mounted at the rear, so there’s little air flow through the case.
Apart from a graphics card, there isn’t much room for any other upgrades. Although the cables have been neatly tied up, conditions are a bit cramped. There aren’t any free memory slots, so if you wanted to upgrade you’d have to get rid of the existing memory. External expansion is more generous, with two USB ports on the front panel and six at the rear, two of which are the faster USB3 ports. Two USB ports are taken up by the cheap Logitech keyboard and mouse set.
A full set of analogue 7.1 audio outputs is provided, along with an optical S/PDIF output for digital transfer. For basic audio, the monitor’s internal speakers are sufficient – they’re clear but not very loud – but to enjoy movies on the Full HD screen we’d advise connecting a proper set of speakers. There’s no Blu-ray drive – just a DVD writer – but there’s plenty of room on the 1TB hard disk for videos.
We really liked the big AOC 2436Vwa monitor that comes with the eXcel i2561 CS. It has excellent contrast and more natural colours than the 24in BenQ G2420HDS, which is supplied with the Dino PC Jurassic 2500. Although the PC itself is fairly unimpressive to look at, it has plenty of performance and room for expansion. However, the Dino PC Jurassic 2500 has far more space inside the case for expansion, and includes a Blu-ray drive, so it just pips the eXcel i2561 CS to the post for an award.
