Cyberpower Infinity Aries SE

The Infinity Aries SE is a general-purpose desktop computer.

The processor is an Intel Pentium E5300 Dual Core, and there is 4GB of memory. These are impressive specifications, comparable to those found in the Mesh Matrix Hush. However, unlike that computer, this one doesn’t come with a graphics card – instead it relies on part of the main motherboard to provide graphics processing power.

The disadvantage here is that this takes resources away from the main processor. When playing games or video, the graphics card would normally do much of the work, but on this computer, as on most laptops, all the work is done by the main processor.

That makes things slower overall, and so the gaming performance of the Infinity Aries SE was not particularly impressive. That said, the sheer power of the processor means that some recent games will run, and if you need to upgrade later, a £40 graphics card doesn’t add too much to the overall cost. You can even use the configuration tool on Cyberpower’s website to add such a graphics card when buying the computer.

The display is a 22in widescreen model, and the computer comes with a decent Logitech keyboard and wired mouse, as well as a good but small set of Logitech speakers. There is a 500GB hard disk and a DVD burner that can read and write all discs except Blu-ray.

As with all new computers at the moment, although the Infinity Aries SE comes with the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista installed, it also includes a voucher for a free upgrade to Windows 7 when that’s released. It also comes with a three-year warranty.

There are few computers we’ve seen that are as cheap as this one and offer so much. The lack of a graphics card could make things tricky for gamers or if you have lots of applications open at once, but since it’s such a cheap computer, and it includes keyboard, mouse, monitor and speakers, that isn’t a particularly big deal.