CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro review: Arrow Lake comes nocking

CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro makes an impressive debut in 2024’s prebuilt landscape, powered by Intel’s new Core Ultra 7 265K processor. Focusing on a mix of power efficiency and next-gen capability that stands toe-to-toe with its peers, it’s an exciting upgrade path for gamers and power users, albeit with a few caveats.

CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro

£1,799

Pros

• Extremely cool under load
• Efficient power draw
• Great price
• Superb cable management
• Five-year warranty

Cons

• Sideward step for gaming
• Need to enable XMP
• Loud with no fan curves

Shop at CyberpowerPC UK

Club386 may earn an affiliate commission when you purchase products through links on our site.
How we test and review products.

For a start, Core Ultra 7 265K doesn’t dramatically outpace its predecessors, but there are enough meaningful improvements for anyone taking the leap from older or more modest systems. It certainly benefits from a few custom adjustments to reach its full potential, but even without them, it has plenty to offer as a forward-looking gaming rig.

Specifications

Intel Core Ultra 7 265K is the newest arrival here, bringing with its eight Lion Cove performance cores and 12 Skymont efficient cores. Second only to Core Ultra 9 285K in Arrow Lake’s line-up, it’s within spitting distance of the flagship, well-rounded with a 5.6GHz boost clock, 30MB L3 Cache, and lofty 250W maximum power draw.

Preparing for future applications that will inevitably rely on artificial intelligence, the latest platform also packs a neural processing unit (NPU) alongside integrated graphics. We’re not quite at the stage where these AI accelerators can outpace dedicated graphics cards, but Team Blue aims to be ahead of the curve, anticipating the direction of the wider industry.

Although the CPU sits in a new LGA1851 socket, forward compatibility makes it easy for existing coolers to slot right in without issue. Our chip sits snug as a bug underneath the stunning Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240 Atmos ARGB AIO. Lighting comes down to personal taste, but I adore the glow of the pump, enhanced with three gorgeous SickleFlow140 PWM fans at the front, and three SickleFlow120 on the AIO and rear.

MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi brings with it a few new goodies that pair well with Arrow Lake, including speedy Bluetooth 5.4, Wi-Fi 7, and 5Gb Ethernet connections to stave off lag. You’ll need a supported router to use the entire 6GHz band, but it’s as stable as they come. The rear I/O is similarly modern, with eight slots split between leading 40Gbps Thunderbolt 4, 10Gbps Type-C and Type-A, two 5Gbps Type-A, and four USB 2.0 ports to choose from.

CyberpowerPC ships the system with a 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade SSD, giving you ample space and speed. If you need a few more terabytes, there are three empty M.2 slots for future upgrades, including a CPU-connected Gen 5 x4 port. With the EZ M.2 clips, it’s a painless experience without a single tool in sight, and the Shield Frozr II thermal covers keep all drives running cool.

As game system requirements are forever rising, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5200 covers you for most new releases. Taking up two of the four DIMM slots even leaves you an upgrade path to plonk a couple more modules in whenever you need to give your rig a boost. It’s strange to see CyberpowerPC opt for plain black sticks rather than RGB, considering they’re roughly the same price nowadays, and the AIO prevents this from being a stealth build. Still, it’s a sleek look either way.

MSI’s RTX 4070 Super Ventus 2X is rather unassuming for Nvidia’s midrange, flying under the radar with its dual fan setup and no RGB lighting in sight. Don’t count it out, though, as 12GB GDDR6X memory, a 192-bit bus, and 2,520MHz clock speed all make for a gaming powerhouse backed with DLSS 3 support.

Although the 850W Corsair RMe Series power supply doesn’t feature a 12VHPWR socket to feed Nvidia’s latest graphics cards, Cyberpower includes an adapter that’s neatly tucked away. This design ethos is present throughout the entire build, both front and back, with the Cooler Master MasterBox 600 chassis affording plenty of routing options. Short of a backside-connected motherboard, this is as clean as a build gets when peering in through the gorgeous tinted tempered glass panel.

CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro has an aggressive price point when compared to previous-generation systems sporting the same graphics card. At £1,799, it costs just £134 more than if you’d piece all these parts together yourself, saving you the hassle of building it. The retailer also bundles it with a lifetime of tech support and a five-year warranty for labour, with two years parts and 12 months collect and return to cover any faults.

Performance

I always endeavour to test prebuilt PCs fresh out of the box to showcase exactly what experience you’ll get without tinkering. However, since Core Ultra 200K CPUs don’t handle the default Windows Balanced power profile well, all benchmarks run on High Performance instead. I have altered some settings to keep comparisons consistent, but highlight each as I go.

• PCSpecialist Nebula Supreme R
  • Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
  • Gigabyte Z890 Eagle WiFi 7
  • Nvidia RTX 4080 Super
  • 32GB DDR5-5600
  • 2TB Samsung 990 Pro
• PCSpecialist Helio Elite
  • AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
  • Asus Prime B650-Plus
  • Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB
  • 16GB DDR5-5200
  • 1TB Samsung 990 Evo
• CyberpowerPC UK Ultra R99 Pro
  • AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
  • MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk WiFi
  • Nvidia RTX 4090
  • 32GB DDR5-6400
  • 2TB WD_Black SN850X
• CyberpowerPC UK MSI Infinity Elite
  • Intel Core i7-14700KF
  • MSI Pro Z790-S WiFi
  • Nvidia RTX 4070 Super
  • 32GB DDR5-5200
  • 1TB MSI Spatium M371
• Corsair One i500
  • Intel Core i9-14900K
  • MSI MAG B760M Mortar WiFi
  • Nvidia RTX 4090
  • 64GB DDR5-6000
  • 2TB Gen 4 NVMe

CPU

Core Ultra 7 265K proves its mettle in Cinebench 2024 tests, gaining on the previous-gen flagship with a single-core score of 133 and multi-core run reaching 1,858. Double the RAM, which you can do using the two spare DIMM slots, and you’re looking at the same scores as PCSpecialist Nebula Supreme R.

Since Intel blesses Arrow Lake with an NPU, the entire series is primed and ready for generative AI. Geekbench AI shows just how much of a difference it makes, practically doubling the CPU’s half precision scores. Not bad, considering we’re only going to see more apps leverage this tech moving into 2025.

RAM

Corsair Vengeance DDR5-5200 doesn’t break any records atop MSI Z890 Gaming Plus WiFi, but 67,339MB/s in AIDA Bandwidth Copy tests shows solid performance nonetheless. Latency is something of an Achilles’ heel for Arrow Lake, but keeping to double digits is lean enough not to notice in everyday tasks.

Do note that CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro didn’t ship with XMP enabled in BIOS, instead defaulting to 4,800MT/s. I enabled XMP for these tests to reflect the true 5,200MT/s the rig is capable of, keeping all comparisons in line.

Storage

Kingston Fury Renegade stands shoulder to shoulder with Samsung and WD’s PCIe 4.0 flagships. Alongside an ample 2TB of storage, it nets you 7,019MB/s sequential read and 6,735MB/s sequential write speeds in CrystalDiskMark. You’ll never be sat there, twiddling your thumbs, waiting to load into your favourite games.

Apps

Slotting in exactly where we’d expect, there’s little in it between any modern configuration in PCMark 10.

Gaming

MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Super Ventus 2X doesn’t disappoint in 3DMark Time Spy. That said, Intel’s latest architecture marks a sideward step in gaming performance compared to previous generations. Sit 265K next to its 12th, 13th, and 14th Gen counterparts, and you’ll be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Upgrade from an older or more entry-level system to a sparkling, new Core Ultra 7-led rig, and it’s a different story.

CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro is designed with 1440p resolutions in mind, but there’s no reason you can’t crank it up to 4K when the mood strikes. HD textures in Far Cry 6 and ray tracing in games as taxing as Cyberpunk 2077 will push the system to the brink of its capabilities, but DLSS is available to lend a helping hand in supported titles. Keep in mind that we test all games at the maximum available settings, giving you room to scale when performance trumps detail.

Vitals

For the performance on offer, Arrow Lake doesn’t ask much in return. 82W idle draws are nearly identical to 14900K builds, but far less hungry under load at just 288W. Your electric bill can’t ask for much from a high-end chip.

Alongside saving you some money, the extra efficiency goes a long way to keeping Core Ultra 7 temps down. Under Cooler Master MasterLiquid 240 Atmos ARGB, it runs 62.3°C under load, making CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro one of the chillest prebuilts we’ve ever tested.

The GPU isn’t far behind, as RTX 4070 Super reaches heights of 63.7°C in games. Safe to say it’s not going to replace your radiators during winter.

CyberpowerPC UK Infinity Z890 Pro makes itself known right out of the box, pushing its SickleFlow fans close to their 1,800rpm ceilings even when idle. While this keeps the system cool at all times, 40.3dBA is quite loud for just browsing the web. Fortunately, there’s a lot of wiggle room to make it quieter.

Simply activating Smart Fan Mode in MSI Click BIOS X reduced idle acoustics down to 37.8dBA with the click of a button. You can optimise this even further by setting a fan curve, reducing it down to a comparatively whisper-quiet 33.7dBA. It requires some trial and error, but you can’t go wrong with record-low temps giving you plenty of leeway.

Conclusion

Sitting between the midrange and high-end line, CyberpowerPC Infinity Z890 Pro offers a lot for its £1,799 price tag. RTX 4070 Super leads the charge, netting you triple-digit frame rates at 1440p resolution, but you’ll need to tinker with some settings to make the most of what this rig has to offer.

While Intel’s latest flagship falls short of the uplift we’d expect from a new architecture, Core Ultra 7 265K does an admirable job of stepping up. It’s something of a sidestep in gaming performance, but there’s value in its efficiency, particularly for those upgrading from a few generations back.

Performance should improve over time, too, as Intel intends to “fix” Core Ultra 200S performance via BIOS and operating system updates. We can’t judge it based on promises, and only time will tell whether this is as successful as AMD’s attempts, as there will inevitably be a power draw trade-off. Still, it’ll hopefully serve as a cherry on top of an already decent system.

Verdict: A high-performing, efficient 1440p gaming PC that just needs a few tweaks to reach its full potential.