Aria.co.uk Gladiator 1155 i5 4.4GHz Bundle

Conclusion

So what can we say? Wow springs to mind.

A bundle where its actually cheaper than buying the bits separately and overclocking it yourself, you get a seriously powerful system. It’s not only that though, after all anyone could just slap an overclock together and push it out the door.

With the Aria Gladiator you’re getting a sorted system, and that’s what really struck us. From the moment we opened the sturdy box and saw how brilliantly and carefully the Gladiator bundle had been packaged you knew this was something different to the rest.

The decision to include all the manuals and accessories along with the bundle is a nice touch and really allows you to use this as a stepping off point to learn how to overclock. Once you can see what Aria themselves have done you can then use this new found knowledge to start your own overclocking adventure. It’s lovely to see them not just bumping the volts up to an arbitrary amount for a guaranteed overclock, but instead with a mere 1.3v on the 2500K you are getting the best of both worlds without compromising the cool and quiet Arctic Cooling Freezer 13.

Not that this is purely for the neophyte overclocker. The price difference between buying the bits and building it yourself, and buying this pre-built system is so tiny that if you’re in the market for an upgrade, you’d be foolish to not look long and hard at this Gladiator bundle.

You also, of course, remove so many potential things by buying it pre-built. You know that all the parts work. You know you haven’t been (extremely) unlucky enough to get a Core i5-2500K that wont overclock past 4GHz. Perhaps even more importantly in these days with so many things that are making demands upon our time, you can just plug and play, rather than have to build it.

If we can find one small fault, and it is a tiny one, the difference between a fast kit of RAM and the slower one provided here is not unreasonable. But of course better is more expensive, and there are far greater benefits to be had by spending the difference on a good GPU than you’d get from fast RAM and an average GPU.

All in all it’s a phenomenal amount of performance for a very small sum of money. The Core i5-2500K is our favourite of the LGA1155 processors and this only emphasises why. Aria have done an amazing job in providing top performance and yet still managing to get the whole bundle in cheaper than the separate components. Gold.

       

Thanks to Aria for providing the Gladiator for review. Discuss in our forums.