CyberPower Infinity 3D 2000 review

It may not have taken off in the way TV companies would like, but we’re seeing 3D appear in more PCs and laptops these days – so the arrival of CyberPower’s latest machine with a 3D monitor in tow didn’t come as a surprise.

The monitor in question is a ViewSonic VX2268wm, which has a 22in screen and is compatible with Nvidia’s 3D Vision kit – which CyberPower has included with its Infinity 3D 2000. Even without the 3D gimmick, though, it’s a reasonable display: an average Delta E of 2.3, measured contrast ratio of 991:1 and luminance of 317cd/m2 mean it’s vivid, bright and very colour accurate.

That’s a good place to start, but it isn’t perfect, with the 1,680 x 1,050 native resolution the first minor disappointment in a machine that includes a Blu-ray drive. The screen takes on a noticeable grain when lighter images are displayed, and viewing angles aren’t particularly good either – lean to the left or right and colours begin to distort. It feels cheap too, thanks to glossy plastic and, despite its chunky construction, it’s extremely wobbly.

The power to play 3D titles comes from Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card. It’s a fine mid-range card, and is capable of handling most of today’s top games – as a score of 41fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test demonstrates. Turn on the system’s 3D kit, though, and frame rates take a turn for the worse, with that same test returning a score of only 24fps when run at the screen’s native resolution of 1,680 x 1,050. So you may have to turn some of the options down to make some titles playable.

The effect works well thanks to the maturity of Nvidia’s drivers, but you’ll get more pure gaming grunt elsewhere – the A-Listed Chillblast Fusion Flash doesn’t come with a 3D screen, but it does include an AMD Radeon HD 6970, which scored 53fps in the Very High quality test.

Joining the graphics card is Intel’s top-end Core i7-2600K and 8GB of RAM. This normally runs at 3.4GHz, but here it’s overclocked to 4.5GHz. That’s a tad low (the Chillblast Fusion Flash ran its Core i5-2500K at 4.8GHz and scored 1.17) but it’s enough to deliver excellent levels of performance, with a benchmark score of 1.1.

The rest of the specification falls in line with what we’d expect. There’s a 32GB OCZ Onyx SSD, which CyberPower has configured to take advantage of the Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3-B3 motherboard’s ISRT caching, and storage consists of a 2TB Samsung Spinpoint F4 hard disk. There’s a Blu-ray reader, too, which makes the 1,680 x 1,050 native resolution of the monitor a little disappointing.