Aria Dominator 560Ti System Review
Introduction
Most of us ‘enthusiasts’ learnt to build our own computers for two main reasons.
The first is one simply of cost. PCs come in two flavours, the cheap Internet ready variety which are fine for the most basic tasks but useless for anything more strenuous than Freecell, and the Gaming PC, which can play pretty much anything but comes with a price-tag to match.
The second, and often overlooked, reason is the parts list. How often have you seen a specification and thought “if only it had a better cooler/more RAM/whatever”? So rather than paying through the nose to get a collection of bits you’ll need to upgrade anyway it is easier to build it yourself.
Of course we’re well aware that not everyone has the confidence or capabilities to build an entire system. There is quite a gulf between switching out a graphics card and installing a CPU and the relevant cabling.
What would be really fabulous was if a company came up with a system that had all the choicest bits of hardware, at an affordable price, without any of the hassle of building a system yourself. Aria have just the thing in the Dominator 560Ti so we just had to take a look.
What Do You Get?
If you’re the type of person who keeps up with the hardware market, and thanks to OC3D that should be easy to do, then a quick run down of the specifications list here should get you nodding your head in approval.
The i5-2500K is our own weapon of choice here on the OC3D P67 bench table, we recently praised the GTX560 Ti very highly, Mushkin we love, Kingston make probably the best series of SSDs on the market, the Spinpoint F3 is probably the most popular hard-drive on the planet, MSI motherboards are bulletproof and the Corsair PSUs have been a mainstay of high-end rigs for a long time.
Wrap that all up in the fabulous CM690 II Coolermaster case and a years warranty, there really isn’t anything to complain about at all. Even the DVD drive is Sony rather than some no-brand cheapo example. £1099.99 gets you an extraordinary amount of power these days.
⢠FREE CPU Overclocking to 4.70GHz
⢠Intel® 2nd Generation Core⢠i5-2500K Processor
⢠GeForce GTX 560Ti OC 1024MB GDDR5 Graphics Card
⢠8GB Mushkin (2x4GB) DDR3 1600MHz 9-9-9-24 Blackline – 996776
⢠Kingston 64GB SSDNow V100 2.5″ SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive
⢠1TB Samsung HD103SJ Spinpoint F3 SATA-II 3.5″ Hard Drive
⢠MSI P67A-GD55 Intel P67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 PCI-Express Motherboard
⢠Corsair TX Series 850W ATX2.2 SLI Compliant Power Supply
⢠Coolermaster CM 690 II Advanced NVIDIA Edition Midi Tower
⢠Gelid Tranquillo CPU Cooler
⢠Sony 24x DVD/RW
⢠Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
⢠1 Years RTB Warranty
⢠Pre-Installed Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit