Personal Tech

Budget PCs

Eclipse Mirage A995R467 review

By Paul Monckton | PC Advisor
Published: 00:01 GMT, 02 July 09

Eclipse is the second PC manufacturer in our chart to dabble with an AMD processor. The Mirage A995R467 runs a 2.6GHz quad-core Phenom X4 Black Edition 9550 CPU.

With the exception of Intel's Core i7 chips, quad-core CPUs struggle in our WorldBench 6 speed test, and the Eclipse Mirage A995R467's lowly score of 95 may seem a little weak. But such processors race ahead when using multithreaded apps, and are far more adept at multitasking.

Eclipse supplies the same 19in Hanton display with the Mirage A995R467 as the Recommended Palicomp PC. Whether you'll swoon over its high-gloss finish is a matter of personal taste and, to some extent, your room lighting. It certainly looks good playing games.

In common with the Best Buy Arbico, Eclipse has fitted an ATI Radeon HD 4670 graphics card. The Mirage A995R467 is not only able to keep up with the framerates achieved by that PC, but actually improves on them.

The system case is tidy, but plain: it looks rather cheap when compared to the Palicomp or CyberPower housings. Inside, the Eclipse Mirage A995R467's Asus motherboard is large but offers several expansion ports (sadly, not for dual graphics cards or additional RAM). A beefy 650W AlphaPower PSU provides ample headroom for overclocking, too.

Chart ranking: Budget desktop PCs (September 09 issue)

  1. Arbico CD 8467 XL
  2. Palicomp Ballistix Excalibur E85SLI-19
  3. CyberPower AMD Pre-Build 2 Cores
  4. Eclipse Mirage A995R467
  5. HP Compaq Presario CQ5011uk

[ 1 ] [ 2 ] continued on page 2 »

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