Aria Gladiator Centurion Lite
Gaming PC with wide appeal
Imagine you really fancy a curry, but the local Chinese restaurant has a special offer and you can get a whole banquet for the price of your usual balti. Do you stick with what you know you wanted, or let yourself be swayed?
Don’t worry, this is still Computeractive, we haven’t morphed into Takeaway Weekly. PCS, you see, can be a bit like dinners. In our office, we tend to favour desktop PCS that devote more of their budget to the central processor ( CPU) rather than the graphics card, so that we get our money’s worth in all-round performance, and we can do a little 3D gaming and advanced graphics tasks if and when we need it. That’s our regular chicken tikka masala, if you like.
But this year’s new generation of graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia offer such huge amounts of processing power at affordable prices that it’s tempting to buy a PC that uses more of its budget on superior graphics technology. This will already be important to you if you happen to be a gaming PC user. Either way, this system from Aria is well worth a look. By using a fairly modest Intel i3 CPU, it leaves enough change from a sensible £600 budget for a shiny new Geforce GTX 1060 graphics card, based on Nvidia’s latest Pascal architecture.
This particular 1060 comes with only 3GB of memory (others have 6GB), and has a few other small technical restrictions. On the other hand, thanks to Nvidia’s memory-compression techniques it’s arguably more like a 4GB card. In any case, it made short work of our gaming tests, running a very challenging shooting game at a respectable 50 frames per second (fps) at Full HD resolution, with maximum quality settings. A less demanding racing game hit 90fps even at a 2560x1440-pixel resolution.
Beyond gaming, the value of a GPU is harder to assess. Unlike when you upgrade to a faster CPU, adding a GPU won’t automatically help with every task. Only software specifically designed to use the relevant type of GPU will benefit. The good news is that Nvidia cards are widely supported by photo- and video-editing programs and 3D-animation software, but also work well in non-graphics tasks through CUDA, Nvidia’s technology for carrying out general processing work on the GPU. CUDA users include scientific researchers as well as graphics professionals.
A compatible GPU in video-editing software, for example, is more likely to let you add colour correction and special effects to your timeline without making real-time playback jerky. But it’s less likely to help with tasks like transcoding from one format to another, which would gain more from a more powerful CPU. In our benchmark tests the Aria scored very well on image editing despite the i3, pretty well on video editing, and in line with other i3 systems in multitasking.
Audio is also well served. As well as a headphone jack there are rear speaker and subwoofer connections. There’s also an S/PDIF fibre-optic socket, and three of the USB ports have DAC-UP, which helps to get the best from external digital-to-analogue accessories. Inside the case, little is fitted except the GTX 1060 and a 1TB hard drive, but there are lots of slots and bays for more, including M.2 for a fast SSD. The four fans (in addition to the processor coolers) can get a little noisy, but should stop anything melting.
You might prefer a more powerful i5 CPU, or spend a little more on an i7, but the Gladiator Centurion Lite is an attractive option. In the end, it comes down to your personal needs.
It’s geared towards gaming and graphical tasks, but should appeal to all