CyberPowerPC Infinity Xtreme Halo Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing 

Although our review unit is an eye watering £6400, and it IS possible to build something faster for the same money (by choosing cheaper components or cutting corners), what you are getting here is something that has true elements of modding and building craftsmanship to it. All of the components are nothing short of the best in their range, and even the Primary PCIE SSD blows away what almost all gamers would consider as fast benchmarks for high end SSDs. There are no questionable or unbranded parts here, and absolutely no sacrifices have been made. To the contrary, I was excited to see the braided power cables had special holders which meant they could be channelled flat into lanes, which is both very neat and looks great – PC builders take note. For those who are used to water cooling but not the solid acrylic variety, there is something magical about seeing everything fit together so precisely knowing that it is done by hand and that the end result is exquisite. For this much money you could probably put it in a beige box with standard air coolers, a standard SSD and perhaps be able to squeeze in a 3rd Titan X, but in circumstances like this I would see why you would choose this over the latter.

For those of you wanting to price up a system, you can do so here

Overview

The In-Win S-Frame chassis needs a full article review in itself and you can find that here, though In order to get in as much as possible here I will pick out the key aspects of it. First off it is absolutely gorgeous. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder obviously and I have spoken to the odd person who isn’t keen, though I personally found it to be brilliant and even more so in the flesh, it reminded me of a “concept PC”, melding an interpretation of futuristic design with bleeding edge tech. It shows off everything you want to see and hides (almost) everything. Giving you everything that you need, there were a couple of boxes in with the packaging (one being the motherboard box) which was jam packed full of goodies relating to the system build, including manuals, discs, warranty cards, WiFi antennae and more. Another nice touch was the Cyberpower logo, which has been tastefully placed on the right hand side.

The case itself only comes in 2 flavours, Black/Red and the Black/Gold mix we have here, so worth bearing this in mind if you aren’t a fan of those colour sets. Still, nothing from the adventurous amongst us changing this to whatever is desired I guess. The system as a whole (inclusive of case, components, cooling etc) is extremely heavy and is a 2 man job to move around, though this is not something you should envisage moving or transporting back and forwards to LANs. The “open air” top design is a bit unnerving. I couldn’t help imagining nightmare situations of dropping a coin in or a stray kitten finding its way in there. As much as is it gloriously seductive, if you have young children or mischievous pets please – make sure they cant get anywhere near this!

CPU performance in our review model came in the form of the top deck i7-5960X with 8 physical cores, 16 threads, a whopping 20MB of L3 Cache and a tasty 20% overclock from the original 3-3.5GHz. In our benches it performed admirably, and we even suspected that there may be even more untapped juice available with a bit of tweaking here and there. Even though this CPU smashed its way through our benches, we reckon that in multi-threaded applications/situations it would perform even better. The CPU and both GPU’s are all water cooled in the same loop, and thanks to the radiator and reservoir there is ample surface area to cool the fluid. There’s the obvious open air design of the case which assists the already brilliant thermals, but again with a cooling system like this inside it’s more of icing on the cake really. The rigid piping has been meticulously crafted with sub millimetre accuracy and the cable management is second to none. I appreciate for this review sample your burning desire will need to be matched by a burning wallet of cash, though as mentioned earlier you can pretty much configure your own so it may be possible to get one within your budget.

An unsung hero of this system is the rather brilliant Asus X99 Deluxe motherboard, giving each one of the Titan X’s full 16x worth of bandwidth, WiFi with an incredible range.  A myriad of ports including dual 10GB/s SATA express, 5xPCI 3.0, 14 USB 3 (4 on headers), 8 channel audio and the occasional lifesaver USB BIOS flashback button complete the setup. Our memory slots were filled with 8x4GB sticks of DDR4 totalling 32GB running at 2400MHz. I often get asked what I do personally with so much memory (In my personal rig I have 32GB) as most claim it will sit there not being used. When you have over 16GB like this you should be considering creating a RAM drive/RAMDisk with the rest (a temporary “hard drive” stored in RAM, which is very, VERY fast), especially if you need a temporary location to store your FRAPS/OBS/Shadhowplay replays. As you can imagine, even a 12GB RAM Drive would leave you with plenty of system memory to spare, with 12GB left for filling with your best action shots.

GPU performance is outrageously good as you would expect, and with each Titan X getting the full cover water block treatment coupled with each card being sat in a PCI-E x16 slot, there is more headroom available too. Running GTA5 on our Acer 4k with G-Sync monitor was nothing short of stunning. To say silky smooth is an understatement. Battlefield 4 at 4k with everything maxed was equally as jaw dropping. Worth noting as a side note if you are gaming in 4k, you really shouldn’t be using anything higher than 2xAA otherwise it is just wasted performance in my opinion. As for our benchmarked games, even the taxing Metro Last Light was barely a challenge. Should more systems like this come along we may need to start upping our benches to include 4k.

The Intel 750 Series SSD here is nothing short of staggering.  The read and write speeds are as fast as multiple high end SATA3 SSD’s combined and provide incredibly sub 10 second cold boot times, with applications and games loading in minimal time too.  In fact when I had this system connected to my home TV I initially found it difficult getting to the UEFI as Windows would be fully loaded by the time my TV had detected signal on its HDMI channel. The 2 SSH (Solid State Hybrid) drives provide a nice balance between traditional extra mechanical storage with the extra pep of the SSD cache, and striping them yields yet more performance, albeit at the cost of data redundancy. What was also nice is that there were 2 extra shelves in the case for future expansion should we ever need it.

The Windows 8.1 installation was completely untouched with the exception of the latest Nvidia drivers and a couple of pieces of benchmarking software, which was nice to see.

For this sample, due to it taking the crown on pretty much every benchmark we’ve ever had I am compelled to give it the extreme award, though this system in my opinion is more – it’s kind of an investment, a rig and a piece of tech art, all rolled into one. Having said all of the above, the variant that we received is not the only model in the range – pretty much every aspect of this system can be tailored for as much or as little spec as you like, you could even go for an AMD GPU setup should you wish. The only things you cannot change in the system components is the architecture (it must be X99), the case and the water cooling, not that it’s a bad thing!

The only thing this system is missing is a rotating podium and a spotlight. If you are lucky enough to own one of these then you should really have it where all can see. It gathers admiration and jealousy in equal amounts and is something that should never be relegated to sitting below your desk.

Pros

• Excellent cable management
• Ultimate component selection
• Fantastic water cooling setup
• Great overclocking potential

Cons

• No optical drive
• Case can be awkward when moving, not a good choice for LAN parties
• Can cost the same as a new car, depending on spec

“The Infinity Xtreme Halo is without a doubt a complete dream machine. The case is a thing of beauty adorned with some of the best hardware money can buy, with touches that usually only a skilled modder would be capable of.”

Thanks to CyberPowerPC for providing this review sample.