CyberPower high-end Video HD workstation PCs

CyberPower announced it is launching a new Power Video series of PCs that includes the XE, XT and XI models. Meant to appeal to students, editors and professionals who work with HD video, the PCs offer NVIDIA or AMD graphics cards and onboard RAM capacities of 4GB, 8GB or 16GB. Each PC in the series can then be further customized with a range of SATA II hard drives or hard drive arrays as well as Blu-ray disc burners. All include a FireWire port, USB ports, a multi-card reader and dual-layer DVD burners in order to read or distribute media files. CyberPower saw it fit to equip each workstation with a liquid CPU cooling system from Asetek as well.

The standard specification of the Power Video XE includes a quad-core 2.4GHz Core 2 Quad set into an NVIDIA 750i SLI mainboard, 4GB of RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT graphics card with 512MB of memory, 500GB hard disk drive along with an integrated 5.1-channel sound card. A Wi-Fi card is also included, while the operating system is Windows Vista Home Premium.

The mid-range Power Video XT has the four-core, 2.83GHz Intel CPU set into the P45 mainboard that brings with it a FireWire port and support for 7.1-channel audio. Buyers will get 8GB of RAM along with an ATI Radeon HD 4850 video card with a dedicated 512MB of dedicated memory. The 1TB SATAII hard drive is preloaded with Vista Home Premium, and an LG Blu-ray burner is included, along with a Sony Blu-ray player.

The flagship of the Power Video series is the XI variant, which includes a 2.93GHz Core i7 with 12GB of RAM. Both are set on Intel's X58 mainboard with SLI/CrossFireX support. Video graphics are handled by ATI's Radeon HD 4870 card with 512MB of dedicated memory. For storage, there are two 1TB SATA II hard drives and a compact 2.5-inch 64GB solid state disk for faster local file access. Optical drives include an LG 6X Blu-ray disc burner and Sony 2X Blu-ray player. An Ethernet port and Wi-Fi PCI card serve as Internet connection options. The same Windows Vista Home Premium OS is included with the XI.

All three Power Video PCs are currently available, with the XE prices starting at $985, the XT at $1,675 and the top-rung XI priced from $2,719.