Cyberpower Liquid High 5GHz review

Intel’s current crop of processors is so stable and efficient that leaving one at stock speeds is seen as a disappointment these days. Given the potential speed boosts, we much prefer a nice overclocked chip – although hitting the heady heights of 5GHz still requires considerable expertise.

The Liquid High 5GHz comes courtesy of Cyberpower, a firm with a reputation for pushing boundaries, and its 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K has been boosted from 3.4GHz to 5GHz thanks to a mammoth 50x multiplier. The result is a benchmark result of 1.26, the joint-highest we’ve ever seen.

It takes more than mere air to keep such a huge overclock at an operable temperature, so Cyberpower has installed a proprietary water-cooling setup. Two of the 5.25in drive bays in the front of the Azza Hurrican chassis are occupied by an XSPC X20 750 reservoir full of blue coolant, and thick cables run towards a roof-mounted XSPC 360mm radiator that’s chilled by a trio of 120mm fans.

Despite the extreme heat produced by the processor, the water-cooling does its job: the 5GHz chip idled at a fine 44°C, peaking at a reasonable 83°C during our stress tests. Given that many lesser overclocks we’ve seen have reached or surpassed that temperature, that’s quite the cooling achievement.

Cyberpower hasn’t paid all its attention to the processor, either. Slotted into the motherboard is Nvidia’s most powerful single-GPU graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580. It demonstrated its power by blasting through our Crysis gaming benchmarks: our High quality test at 1,920 x 1,080 was blitzed at an average of 85fps, while upping the quality to Very High saw the frame rate dip to a still-stunning 57fps – scraping 1fps higher than the current A-List incumbent, Chillblast’s Fusion Dimension.

Eight gigabytes of RAM is more than enough for most tasks, and there’s the usual Blu-ray reader. There’s no separate boot SSD – unlike the Chillblast, which has an 80GB Corsair drive for that job – but Cyberpower uses a 30GB Kingston SSDNow V-Series drive for caching common files, courtesy of Intel’s Smart Response Technology (ISRT). More traditional storage comes courtesy of a 1TB Samsung mechanical disk.