ARBICO inspection
ARBICO Computers may not be a household name to many of our readers yet it's been building systems for six years. Predominantly an eBay seller in the formative years, the company's based out of Sydenham, London, and employs 15 staff. As a rough guide to size, it shipped around 2,000 PCs last year.
ARBICO opts a simple, cheap steel-bodied Cooler Master Elite 333 chassis that's a touch smaller than the HUSH. We've previously built systems in a derivative of the range and, appreciating the budget origins - £60 for chassis and 460W PSU - it's relatively easy to build into.
Weighing in at £699, including VAT, the ARBICO OC2695 XL uses a similar optical drive to the MESH, so you may wonder where the extra expense has been apportioned? The name of the system gives something away, but we'll keep you reading for a short while longer before spilling the beans.
Like the HUSH, identical side-mounted ports offer the expected connectivity, and both systems' were configured correctly from a case-to-motherboard perspective.
The rear-facing ports are almost identical, as well, but the motherboard's not quite as feature-rich, missing out on eSATA and FireWire on the back.
ARBICO ships this base unit with an Intel quad-core chip that's pre-overclocked. The Intel Q9550 runs at a native 2.83GHz, but sat under a Scythe Katana 2 heatsink and few BIOS tweaks to add extra voltage, the chip is shipped at 3.40GHz.
A Gigabyte P43 chipset-based motherboard is decent, and 4GB of Corsair DDR2 memory is the staple diet for a mid-range system. The CPU's performance will be strong, of course, yet graphics are also decent, presented here in the form of an ASUS GeForce GTX 260 896MB in camouflage livery, and clocked in at default speeds.
Customers can opt for a Radeon HD 4870 1GB card instead of the GeForce at no extra cost, however, so take your pick of which brand of GPU suits you.
As you can see, cabling's a little unruly in places and the use of this particular motherboard dismisses the opportunity of adding a second video card for SLI fun. That observation is reinforced when looking at the 460W (35A on 12V line) PSU; it simply wouldn't cut it with another similar card in situ.