Cyberpower Infinity 79 RTX
A fast gaming PC with room for expansion and upgrades, but we wish it didn’t make quite so much noise
SCORE
PRICE £1,083 (£1,299 inc VAT) from cyberpowersystem.co.uk
While I enjoyed using the Chillblast Captain Flight Sim PC ( see p45), there isn’t a compelling reason to spend more than £2,000 if you want to enjoy Microsoft Flight Simulator. This Cyberpower system is a case in point: while it hasn’t been designed to run that highly demanding flight sim, it copes with it comfortably even at 4K. You’ll need to drop the settings from High to Medium, but the rolling hills still look amazing beneath you.
That’s because Cyberpower invests in the core components, with an eight-core Coffee Lake-S Intel Core i7-9700KF chip arguably the most important. This has been usurped by the tenth-generation Core i7-10700KF in Intel’s lineup, but there isn’t a huge generational leap between the two: the older chip’s Turbo Boost speed of 4.9GHz ensures that there’s plenty of power on tap, and it’s unlocked if you want to try your luck at overclocking. Cyberpower includes a Cooler Master Liquid Lite 120 CPU cooler to help on this front, and in combination with the Asus Prime Z390-P motherboard it’s a good choice for “hobbyist” overclockers. Those who are serious about squeezing every last ounce of power from their chosen processor will need a more heavyweight cooler and board, however.
There’s actually an argument for downgrading to a standard air cooler, because if you sit beside the Infinity 79 RTX you’ll hear a near-constant stream of pops and gurgles as the watercooler does its work. Air coolers are more predictable. Nor is this is a good choice for people who like ultraquiet PCs due to a constant whirr of fans; if you prefer a system that runs quiet when idle, upgrade the fans using Cyberpower’s excellent online configurator at the time of order.
You might also want to invest in extra RGB fans for the front of the Onyxia chassis, because as supplied there’s nothing to light up the sheet of tempered glass that sits here. You can see a glow from the single strip of RGB LEDs Cyberpower includes, but these are best appreciated from the side – naturally, this is made of tempered glass too.
One nice touch: Cyberpower includes a remote control so you can set the LEDs’ brightness and choose their colours, or simply switch them off.
Neat cabling both adds to the Infinity’s aesthetics and makes life easier when it’s time to upgrade. At some point, you might want to add to the 16GB of RAM, for instance, with two sockets sitting free. Or you can fill the spare M.2 slot on the motherboard. Or use the numerous spare SATA sockets to add more storage, with two
“The Infinity 79 RTX is a fast all-rounder that should appeal to anyone who wants to stick with the Intel/ Nvidia combination”
2.5in mounting plates above the bay that holds the 650W power supply and space for a second 3.5in hard disk if you remove the right-hand panel. Nothing requires immediate upgrading, however, with a pacy 512GB Adata NVMe SSD – we recorded 2,665MB/sec sequential reads and 2,173MB/sec writes – accompanied by a 1TB Seagate hard disk.
This PC raced through the rest of our benchmarks, too, with a fine overall score of 279, while Geekbench 5 returned 1,317 and 7,668 in the single-core and multicore tests respectively. Inevitably, the Chillblast’s superior processor and 32GB of RAM mean it was faster still, but there’s enough power here to keep most people happy for years to come. You can save money by opting for AMD Ryzen systems instead; five months ago, I reviewed Cyberpower’s Ultra 5 RTX Gaming PC ( see issue 308, p59) with a six-core Ryzen 5 3600 inside and it scored 254 in our benchmarks – while costing £300 less.
The Infinity 79 RTX benefits from Nvidia’s RTX 2060 Super card, as opposed to the plain RTX 2060 in the Ultra 5. You co uld pigeon-hole this as a card suited to 1440p gaming, and it scored 90.6fps in Hitman 2 with our usual challenging settings – bar for supersampling set to 1x rather than 2x. It can cope at 4K in many games, though. Hitman 2 dropped to 45.8fps, but Metro: Last Light ran at 84.3fps while Dirt: Showdown averaged 165fps.
With an 802.11n Wi-Fi card to round things off – leaving one PCIe x1 slot and one PCIe x8 slot free – this is a fast all-rounder that should appeal to anyone who wants to stick with the Intel/Nvidia combination. And there are plenty of options for upgrades. Before you buy, though, consider opting for quieter fans. 8-core 3.6GHz/4.9GHz Intel Core i7-9700KF processor Asus Prime Z390-P motherboard
16GB 3,000MHz DDR4 RAM 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Super graphics Cooler Master Liquid Lite 120 CPU cooler 512GB Adata XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 PCIe SSD 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk 802.11n Wi-Fi PCIe card Cyberpower Onyxia chassis
Inwin A65 650W PSU Windows 10 Home 203 x 475 x 473mm (WDH) 3yr warranty (6 months C&R, 2yr parts, 3yr labour)