Fans of the big green graphics company rejoice, Cyberpower is showing its love of all things Nvidia here with a rig that's ripe for the fanboys.

The CyberPower Infinity Achilles is the most affordable of the Ivy Bridge PCs we've seen, but at just under a grand you'd struggle to actually call it cheap. Though there are most definitely compromises in this sub-£1,000 build.

CyberPower has dropped the lower-end Sandy Bridge E chip, the Core i7 3930K, into this machine and paired it up with the best single-GPU card currently available, the Nvidia GTX 580.

A mid-range desktop PC that's not a gaming powerhouse, but a serious all-rounder

Choice components, water cooling and big league overclocks

Small, simple, rectangular, but oh so desirable

The fastest gaming machine we've ever had

An AMD hex-core build to shake Intel up

Is this Core i7 powered rig rising out of, or falling into the flames?

Ignore the i5 bit, this one's packing and i7! But can it best it's slightly older i5 brother?

Performance rigs aren’t having an easy time of it. Budget systems can be picked up for as little as £500 yet can still throw around most games with wanton abandon (at least at lower settings and resolutions). Meanwhile, the graphics market is bereft of high-end cards that warrant spending silly money. CyberPower has an answer to this particularly tricky problem that comes in the form of lots of glowing piping and clock speeds.

Two months ago, we experienced a miracle in the PCFormat bunker, as if God himself had let a PC descend from the heavens like a dual-core Angel Gabriel. It was the CyberPower Infinty 850, a sub-£550 gaming rig that would run Crysis out of the box. Amen. Would Cyberpower be able to pull off such a marvel again? In a word, no.

The PC landscape is filled with a million upgrade routes, whether it’s a question of fitting an improved graphics card or a CPU and motherboard combination. This is both the beauty and bane of being a PC gamer.

Ask any PC expert and they'll all tell you the same thing: you can't buy a decent gaming PC for £799. Then again, perhaps they haven't seen the Cyberpower Systems Gamer Infinity XT Elite. It's got the gorgeous looks you need in a silver-grey case, with retro-style analogue dials for voltage, fan speed and temperature. Turn it on and blue light shines from the case window. It's also got the hardware, in the shape of a powerful 512MB ATI HD2900XT display card, excellent Creative T6100 5.1 speakers and even an 802.11g Wi-Fi card thrown in for easy networking.

Building a games machine for the future is like attempting archery while attached to an ethanol drip. Although the target is right in front of you, every second you spend concentrating your aim sees it lurching further into the blurry recesses of ‘over there’.

CyberPower prides itself on producing beefy gaming units, but a few of its PCs are more like all-rounders. That's why we decided to review the Gamer Infinity 935 OC, which is a highly capable Core 2 Duo system - no matter what its intended purpose

New memory technologies are thankfully rare beasts. The last was DDR2, and to say its reception was lukewarm would be a massive understatement. In truth it was awful, at least until the operating frequency was upped to a level that actually justified its release

More and more PCs are being sold pre-overclocked, and it's not hard to see why. Not only is it desirable to squeeze extra performance from your machine, but the job is now arguably easier

Cyberpower is a well-established manufacturer of gaming PCs, and its Media Centre HD represents the company's push into the high-definition arena. Question is, should Cyberpower have stayed in its comfort zone?

We don't expect budget PCs to look anything special. CyberPower proved us wrong, though, giving its Infinity 600 an eye-catching case complete with an expensive-looking side window

Time was, if you wanted high-end gear in an off-thepeg unit, you paid upwards of £3,000. Well, this rig flicks the bird to that concept. No PC we've ever tested has run games as well as this one.

When something of the dimensions and weight of this rig gets sent to us for review, we can't help but feel rather sorry for the poor chaps as they lug it up the stairs to our base of operations