It can’t defeat some opponents for
the whole values, but this is still a well-built PC with powerful components.
Price: $1,200
Ranking: 4/5
Arbico
Elite 3578 CS
Arbico usually manufactures high-quality
PCs with wonderful design quality, but this small company often struggles to
offer reasonable prices to compete with its rivals. However, Elite 3578 CS really
is an audacious attempt of them. The PC is equipped with an Intel Core i5-3570
processor running at 3.4GHz. Although it’s not the version that can be
overclocked, it’s powerful enough to achieve an overall score of 121 in our
benchmark tests.
The MSI Z77A-G45 motherboard has a clear UEFI
interface manipulated by a mouse to help you change settings. It has also
plenty of upgrade potential. It doesn’t have any PCI slots – this standard has
gradually been replaced by the PCI-Express – but there are four PCI-E x1 slots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 other two run at x16 and x14,
respectively. The presence of a second high-speed PCI-x16 slot makes this
system a good choice if you want to experiment on the settings of the dual
graphics cards; the motherboard got a CrossFire X certificate from AMD, not an
SLI from Nvidia.
The
motherboard got a CrossFire X certificate from AMD, not an SLI from Nvidia.
Installed in the PCI-E x16 slot on the top
is the AMD Radeon HD 7850 graphics card with 1GB of memory. It has a lot of
power for gaming, as proven by the average frame rates of 29.2fps when running Crysis
2 at 1920x1080 and Ultra quality. This card is powerful enough for gamers to get
satisfied for a long time.
The system drive of this PC is an SSD.
Though this means that you will have an incredibly fast boot time and access
speeds, it has only 60GB capacity, and there’s only 20GB vacant. We have
installed some games (which will benefit from the fast read/write of the SSD) larger
than this, so you will have to prepare to change the default installation
destination for games and applications to the 1TB hard disc.
There’s a lot of room for installing more
drives, with five vacant 3½-inch drive bays, including one external bay which
can contain a 5½-inch or 3½-inch drive. Moreover, there are two additional
vacant external 5¼-inch drive bays.
The Philips 226V3L monitor comes with a
widescreen 21½-inch display rather than the 23.6-inch model which is more
popular, and without any HDMI input, but we are pleased with its color accuracy
and wide viewing angle.
This is a carefully built PC with the
excellent selection of components. The lack of the ability to be overclocked
means that it isn’t as fast as it could possibly be, but it also means that you
don’t have any giant CPU cooler and that a standard Core i5-3570 processor is
powerful enough to handle all kinds of demanding applications in the near
future. Our real and only problem here is the small 60GB SSD boot disc. We
would eagerly pay more to get a 120GB hard disc, which would provide more
capacity for us to install complicated programs which can benefit from the fast
boot time speed. Its monitor is relatively small, but its image quality
compensates for that. This is a good PC, but it needs some enhancements to be
able to compete with other systems like the brilliant Fusion Blaze of
Chillblast.
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Basic
Specifications
·
Part Code: Elite 3578 CS
·
Rating: 4/5
·
Processor: Intel Core i5-3570K
·
Processor external bus: 100MHz (DMI)
·
Processor multiplier: x34
·
Processor clock speed: 3.4GHz
·
Processor socket: LGA1155
·
Memory: 8
·
Memory type: PC3-12800
·
Maximum memory: 32GB
·
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-G45
·
Motherboard chipset: Intel Z77
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