CyberPower Liquid i7 Kraken review

We’ve seen CyberPower’s Liquid i7 Kraken before, but plenty has changed since we saw the original back in September – not least the price, which has dropped by more than £400. We all know a price drop means a reduction in power and quality, right?

Wrong. The new Liquid i7 Kraken takes a Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K and overclocks its core from 3.4GHz to 4.6GHz, producing a massive score of 3.49 in our application benchmarks. That’s the same record-breaking figure as the Yoyotech Fi7epower 4.8, and enough to leave non-Sandy Bridge PCs eating their dust: the previous benchmark record was a then-outstanding 2.91.

Replacing the previous Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 is its successor, the GTX 580, and this brings stellar gaming performance. It turned in average frame rates of 57fps in our 1,920 x 1,080 Very High quality Crysis test and 49fps when we enabled 4x anti-aliasing. Pushing it further, it handled 8x and 16x anti-aliasing at averages of 42fps and 35fps respectively. Only when we upped the resolution to a large-format 2,560 x 1,600 did the Kraken prove fallible, with a slightly juddery 27fps at Very High quality and with 4x anti-aliasing activated.

The rest of the specification is fine. As with the original Kraken and most enthusiast-level machines we’ve seen since, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit is loaded from an SSD, but the brand has changed: out goes the popular Intel X25, and in its place comes a 64GB Crucial RealSSD C300. You also get a Blu-ray reader, 1TB of standard hard disk space and 4GB of DDR3 RAM. Only the latter looks a little mean alongside rivals that have begun to offer 6GB or even 8GB of memory as standard.

It’s all packed into the same Cooler Master CM 690 II Lite chassis, which is differentiated from the Advanced model by the loss of its roof-mounted SATA 3Gb/s port. The chassis offers decent build quality and good looks, even if it can’t match the matte-black curves of the Yoyotech.