New products tested by our experts
CyberPower Infinity X147 GRE Gaming PC
PC | £2,002 from CyberPower www.snipca.com/48558
Pulling a fast one
This is one of the most expensive PCs we’ve reviewed for some time, but for the price tag you get an extremely powerful specification. If you’re looking for a PC that will run anything you care to throw at it (including the latest games) and components that will keep you up to speed for years to come, this might just be the machine for you.
At its beating heart is the Intel Core i7-14700KF chip. This 14th-generation processor only arrived in October, so is definitely at the cutting edge of Intel’s range. It’s packed with 20 cores, eight of which are performance cores. The remaining 12 efficiency cores manage the basic jobs, so their hard-working counterparts don’t get bogged down when you need that little bit extra. The processor is supported by 32GB of RAM and a lightning-quick 2TB Samsung SSD.
That combines to make it the fastest PC we’ve reviewed to date. When you compare it with the previous fastest – the 64GB Minisforum UM790 Pro (£730 from www.snipca.com/48560) with its AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor – this Intel-powered PC runs 10-per-cent faster in single-core tests, but a more impressive 55-per-cent faster in multi-core tests. It’s obviously more than capable of handling any Windows task you throw at it.
One of the reasons why this PC costs significantly more, however, is the graphics hardware. This is located on a standalone graphics card (AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 GRE). This GRE version is only available to PC manufacturers (ie, it can’t be bought separately), and isn’t as powerful (or as expensive) as the retail version, which at the time of writing costs around £800.
It still represents a huge slice of the budget for a single component, but it certainly pays off if you like gaming. At a resolution of 1440p (2560x1440 pixels) it managed to achieve impressive average frame rates of 115 frames per second (fps) across all the games we tested – and that was with all their graphical settings turned up to the max.
Even at 4K resolution we were getting respectable figures. A few games dropped to frame rates of between 50 and 60fps, which isn’t quite fast enough, but turn down just a few detail settings and you’ll be back into triple figures. If you don’t need this level of gaming power, you can opt for a PC without a graphics card, such as the Palicomp AMD Cobra (£400 from www.snipca.com/43515, reviewed Issue 643) a
