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Talking of fans, this case is packed to the gills with them and they're all large too. In front of the hard drive bays are two 120mm intake fans that include dust filters. On the top there are two giant 140mm blowers that are just perfect for mounting a large water cooling radiator under (if you fancy doing a bit of tinkering). Finally, there is a further 140mm fan on the back just next to the CPU. All this lot combined does an excellent job of keeping all the components cool and, although the industrial design is rather uncompromising in achieving the impressive cooling performance still, we'd recommend it for an extreme system like this.

Aside from the aforementioned problems with noise and stability, the build quality is top notch with all cables routed in such a way as to optimise airflow and keep clutter to a minimum. There's nothing extravagant here that's going to impress your mates, like you would get with the machines Vadim used to produce, but everything's neat enough and the optional basic lighting and UV trimming adds a little something if you like that sort of thing.

One thing I must applaud is the balance of components that CyberPower has put together. All too often you see gaming PCs configured with £500 quad core CPUs, terabytes of storage, and only 2GB of RAM and a single graphics card. By combining a relatively low cost CPU with ample 4GB of RAM and Vista 64-bit, your everyday computing experience is going to feel snappier and the dual graphics cards give you miles of headroom for gaming. Considering we gave CyberPower no influence on what type of system to send us, it's good to see its version of a quality gaming system fits in exactly with ours.

We started our performance testing with PCMark Vantage, which tests all aspects of a PC's performance including image editing, video encoding, gaming, web browsing and productivity. The CyberPower achieved an overall score of 5366, which is not bad at all. Obviously the gaming score is high and the CPU and memory help considerably but hard drive speed in particular would seem to be the main reason this otherwise fast machine doesn't get a higher score.

Next we moved onto game testing and very quickly it became obvious this machine glided through games with the ease of water off a duck's back. Call Of Duty 4 at 1,920 x 1,200 with 4xAA, was running at over 90fps. Moving onto the ultimate test - Crysis - we fired up our usual test run at 1,920 x 1,200 with 2xAA and got a very playable 50.46 fps. An ultimate gaming machine this is without doubt - it really is amazing what £1,000 can buy you nowadays!

Verdict

We asked CyberPower to send us the best gaming PC it could for £1,000 and the machine we received fit the bill superbly. The combination of components is near enough exactly what we would've picked ourselves and the incredible performance, particularly in our gaming tests reflects this. The build quality is fine, though not outstanding and we did have a few stability issues due to the extreme overclocking that had been applied but we're sure these issues could easily be fixed with a quick call to tech support and the three-year warranty ensures you'll be trouble free for the life of the PC.

UPDATE here is the direct link to order this PC for £998.75 inc VAT

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