Aria FX-Viper 8320 review

If you’re in search of a bargain, look no further than Aria’s FX-Viper 8320. A gaming PC powered by an AMD processor, Aria’s PC costs significantly less than its rivals. The £895 price tag covers only the main system unit, but factor in the price of a decent monitor, keyboard and mouse and it’s still a good deal for a bargain gaming system.

Housed in an imposing black Sharkoon Bulldozer mid-tower sized ATX case, the Aria PC has a chunky, industrial look, enhanced with dramatic blue internal lighting. The blue theme continues inside with a striking blue motherboard mounting plate and blue blanking plates at the rear. Four font-facing USB ports are provided, two of which are USB 3.0.

The eight-core AMD FX-8320 processor has been overclocked from 3.5GHz up to 4.4GHz but, sadly, the application performance of this system cannot match up to the speed of any overclocked Intel-based competition. Still, a PCMark 7 score of 5219 points is a respectable result.

Gaming performance is delivered by a Sapphire AMD Radeon R9 280X Vapor-X OC graphics card. This is a slightly overclocked version of the stock R9 280X featuring a large, quiet vapour-chamber cooling unit with dual fans.

Aria FX-Viper 8320: frame rates

Frame rates from this system were rather lower than average, but when gaming at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, you’ll still be able to exceed the magic 60 fps in most games at high quality. This is plenty of performance for the majority of gamers.

The system incorporates a 600W Corsair CX600M power supply, which we feel is somewhat insufficient for this AMD-based system. When running at full load, we measured a power draw of a massive 657W which exceeds the specification of the PSU, although it should be noted that the PC ran without problems.

Storage is provided by a 2TB Seagate hard drive, complemented by a 120GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD for faster boot times and improved performance. (See also Group test: What’s the best gaming PC?)