Cyberpower Liquid Gamer Infinity SLI review

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.

Improved performance

There are a couple of giveaways in its name - most obviously, this boasts a pair of graphics cards in SLI, but more importantly that this is a water-cooled rig.

CyberPower hasn't thrown in this arctic chiller just for looks either; it has used the extreme cooling to push the performance of the graphics cores and the CPU to impressive levels. The E8600 CPU for instance has pushed from its stock 3GHz up to 4.15GHz, and that alone equates to healthy boost in your games.

CyberPower has elected to overclock a pair of the newer 8800 GTS cards in this rig. The default setting for these cards has the core clocked at 650MHz, with a memory clock of 970MHz, but here these clocks have been pushed to 780MHz (equating to a shader clock of 1925MHz), and 1100MHz respectively.

Powerful gaming rig

This equates to a speedy graphics subsystem that will give any of the latest cards a run for their money. Indeed, in testing, we saw some of the best framerates yet in the likes of Crysis and World in Conflict, as well as a score to aim for in the recently released 3D Mark Vantage.

Only the processor and graphics cards have been plumbed into the water-cooling system, in order to provide enough leeway to overclock these units reliably.

The downside of this move is that in order to overclock the memory, additional cooling is needed in the case to keep everything running smoothly, and this of course equates to a system that is noisier than your average water-cooled rig. It is wonderfully stable though.

Affordable greatness

The last great bit of news about this system is the price. Admittedly this could never be described as cheap, but for what you're getting, it's still incredibly good value for money.

Ready-built water-cooled rigs have traditionally cost a fortune - anything in the region of three grand and upwards. The recent culling of desktop pricing has meant that such systems have been rendered over-expensive extravagances.

The Liquid Gamer Infinity SLI on the other hand is an impressive collection of components and system engineering that performs wonderfully when and where it's needed