iBuyPower Erebus GT: The Fast and the Inexpensive

28.03.2012
Two questions: What the heck is an Erebus? And how the heck is this system so fast?

According to Greek mythology, Erebus is the "personification of darkness." We would have guessed that it was something related to Nike, given the crazy speeds of iBuyPower's Erebus GT. The competition at the top of the is pretty tight in terms of general performance, but the Erebus GT shines in plenty of other areas, too: Killer gaming capabilities combine with a beautiful, easy-to-access, water-cooled interior and every modern connection type you might think to plug in.

One of the biggest selling points of the Erebus GT is its price: A cool $2499 (as of March 28, 2012) nets you access to one of the fastest systems on our performance PC chart. That stunning speed is mostly thanks to the system's 3.5GHz Intel Core i7-2700K CPU, overclocked (and liquid-cooled) to a mighty 4.6GHz of processing power. The triple-fan radiator and separate single radiator found in this system's loop aren't just for looks. Rounding out the system's processing guts is a hefty 16GB of DDR3-1600 memory--not shabby in the slightest.

Our only criticism of the system's loadout--and it's a slight one--is that iBuyPower doesn't throw in 2TB of storage (or more). That said, the Erebus GT's combination of a 1TB drive and a solid-state drive still gives users a healthy amount of capacity and power.

The result? A breathtaking score of 211 on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests, representing one of the best price-for-performance matchups you can find on our performance PC chart. But there's more: The Erebus GT also carries one of the fastest single-GPU graphics cards on the market right now, the , which delivered a commanding frame rate of 59.6 frames per second on our Crysis 2 benchmark (2560 by 1600 resolution, high quality). And did we mention that the card is water-cooled as well?

iBuyPower nailed the Erebus GT's look, feel, and lighting, down to the tiniest detail--from the flattened look of the system's front, to the plastic ventilation fins on its top, to its crystalline-etched side panel, to the neat mix of half-inch hoses and angled connectors that leaves not a single liquid-cooled element feeling out of place. It's simply beautiful construction.