Water cooling used to be the domain of the true enthusiast, hidden away in a darkened room trying to get the last drop of performance from a highly overclocked system – but not any more.

Thanks to easily installed water-cooling kits, most people can now have a go. There are also more manufacturers offering water-cooled options for those wanting a fast, stable system out of the box.

Cyberpower’s Liquid Gamer Infinity SLI offers a water-cooled, overclocked dual-core processor and SLI graphics setup, together with fast tuned memory.

Sitting under its well-made Thermaltake CPU cooling block is one of the current overclockable dual-core CPUs of choice – Intel’s E8400.

As standard, this comes with a 3GHz clock speed, 6MB of L2 cache and a 1,333MHz FSB (front-side bus). By using water cooling, Cyberpower has got it to run stably at an impressive 4.15GHz.

Backing up the CPU is 4GB of OCZ Reaper PC2-8500 DDR2 memory. As standard, this runs at 1,066MHz, but with its built-in heatpipe cooling, it’s also overclockable; in the Liquid Gamer Infinity it’s running at 1,100MHz at a latency of 5-5-5-15.

All of this, as you might expect, gives the Liquid Gamer Infinity plenty of power. Indeed, it’s the fastest system we’ve ever tested, with a PCmark05 score of 11,344 and 5,694 in the more stressful PCmark Vantage.

The CPU sits in a good choice of motherboard: an EVGA 780i SLI. This uses Nvidia’s Nforce 780i SLI chipset and, although the board comes with passive heatsinks, Cyberpower has used the optional fan to cool the Northbridge. This helps with stability, although the noise from the fan goes against the idea of a silent, water-cooled system.

Graphics are driven by a pair of BFG Geforce 8800GTS cards configured in SLI mode. These cards have faster clocks than normal, but Cyberpower has gone a stage further by turning up the core clock to 780MHz (a standard 8800GTS runs at 650MHz) while the memory is clocked up to a 1,000MHz (2,000MHz effective).

To enable this amount of overclocking, Cyberpower has used a couple of Dangerden graphics cooling blocks to keep the cards cool and stable.

Graphics performance is also impressive. In 3Dmark05 it scored 26,930, while in 3Dmark06 it clocked 19,708.

All this hardware needs a case with a lot of internal space, and the Thermaltake Armour LCS certainly delivers. With plenty of internal space at its disposal, Cyberpower has built a very neat and tidy water-cooling system. The radiator stands vertically, tucked away in the lower seven-bay drive cage, while the reservoir and pump sit neatly on the base of the case.

The size of the case also lends itself to tidy power and data cable runs, and the Liquid Gamer Infinity is one of the best systems we have seen in a very long time.

With all this power-hungry hardware lurking about, you’ll also need a good power supply. The colourful Tagen Piperock 900W modular power supply sits in the top of the case and more than takes care of the needs of the various components. Sitting next to the power supply in a three-bay drive cage is a 1TB Samsung hard disk.

As you can see from the photo, if you like your PCs nice and showy, then this system won’t disappoint. Blue fans, UV-reactive data cables, green die in the cooling liquid and a power supply with lit outlets all combine to create a feast for the eyes.