At only £1149 the Elite 7768 OCX may look a good-value buy, but you must factor in the cost of many additional items. This PC comes as a base-unit only to which a monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers or headphones must be added. See Group test: What's the best gaming PC?
Of course, this approach does leave you free to choose the components you want, and this was Arbico’s reasoning behind selling the system this way. See also Arbico 5300-HD Media Centre
The PC comes with a 3.4GHz Intel Core i5-3570K processor overclocked to a speedy although not over-ambitious 4.4GHz. This allows for a decent boost in performance without having to go crazy with an expensive case and cooling system that’s required when overclocking faster. Take a look at Yoyotech Warbird 3570XTA too.
Its 1TB Seagate hard drive is complemented by a 120GB OCZ Vertex 4 SSD which offers very good, although not sensational storage performance. See all PC reviews.
Arbico has installed the PC inside a CIT Jupiter system case which is a snug fit for the many internal components, yet remains tidy thanks to cable management features and neat cabling by the vendor. The processor is fitted with a twin-fan Xigmatek Gaia cooler and both hard drive and SSD are mounted in handy right-angle bays.
A total of 16GB of RAM is included, along with a Blu-ray reader and Creative X-Fi Xtreme sound card. This adds up to 7.1-channel surround-sound processing and support for OpenAL and EAX 4.0 gaming effects as well as optical digital input and output connections. It does lack the hardware acceleration of the more advanced Sound Blaster Recon 3D supplied by Computer Planet and Quiet PC.
Tweakers will like the MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard which comes with a graphical UEFI which is mirrored by an identical user interface in a Windows-based utility. It also supports easy one-click overclocking and nVidia SLI, should you want to add a second graphics card as an upgrade.
The supplied Gainward-branded nVidia GeForce GTX 680 graphic card provides ample power for gaming, although this particular model isn’t as fast as some of the factory-overclocked models found elsewhere, resulting in slightly less impressive frame rates than other PCs based on this graphics processor.
Comments