CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme 5200 Desktop Review
by Dustin Sklavos on August 22, 2013 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Haswell
- GCN
- desktops
- Radeon HD 7000
The CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme 5200 leaves me with very mixed feelings pretty much across the board. Some of these are things that CyberPowerPC has no control over (Haswell and AMD's graphics driver issues); some of these are things that CyberPowerPC does have control over (component selection).
Starting with the components, while I like the Fractal Design Arc Midi R2 as a classier alternative to what I'm used to seeing from boutiques, I'm wondering if they wouldn't have been better off just dodging the fan controller for the CPU fans. Really I'm not sure what's going on there. As I said before, the motherboard itself definitely gets the job done, but there are only two USB 3.0 ports on the back and just three audio jacks. I maintain that storage should've been handled by a 120GB/128GB SSD and a higher quality hard drive choice. The CPU overclock needed to be tuned with at least a little bit greater care, and the Radeon HD 7990 is just kind of a non-starter, at least for now.
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I feel like I'm almost doing a little bit of damage control, which isn't entirely fair. The system works and it works well, and when it performs, it does perform. But the balance is out of whack; this isn't the system I would build for this price tag. Frankly I'd grab the much less expensive Gamer Infinity XLC, add an overclock and an SSD, and call it a day. Really, I feel like where you need to be for a mid to high end gaming desktop that offers good value looks something like this: i5-4670K OC, decent Z87 motherboard, 8GB of DDR3-1866, 128GB SSD, 1TB HDD, GTX 770/HD 7970. If you want to go surround or just need more graphics horsepower, add a second GTX 770.
Ultimately, CyberPowerPC offers better configurations for the money, but the iffy QC on this review unit coupled with the poorly handled overclock does them no favors. There are little things that can be done here and there in the production chain to improve CyberPowerPC's profile; they have the economy of scale needed to compete with smaller boutiques, where they can match quality and offer a better price. They just need to get there, and I hope that they do.
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Flunk - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
To clarify "minimum clocks" is not the advertised clock speed, but the emergency downclock frequency, which I believe was 1.2Ghz for the CPU and 200Mhz for the GPU. a 1.2Ghz i7 with a 200Mhz Geforce 640m is not much fun.Ubercake - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
I definitely prefer to build my own, but I've dealt with CyberpowerPC in the past. They build a good PC. I had no issues with their machines. A three-year warranty included is pretty darn good in this day and age of the one-year warranty (but other OEMs will gladly sell you more for a few hundred bucks!).I've dealt with Dell in the past more than once. In each instance, the PC would not boot when I received it and I had to fix something to get it working either with loose hardware or in the BIOS configuration. It's like they don't even boot the PC before they ship it out. Not good when you fork out your hard-earned dollars for a PC.
If I were looking for someone to build me a PC (might never happen in my lifetime, but if I were), I wouldn't hesitate to pick my own parts from the CyberpowerPC.com site and have them build it.
I would never buy a Dell again.
Sabresiberian - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
While I might have agreed with your assessment of CyberPower in the past, this build totally throws them in the "will not buy from this company" bin. Using cheap parts is not a good solution; even if you are building a budget PC, which of courser this is not. proper selection and system balance can keep the price low and quality high.As far as Dell - anyone can make a bad single product, or even a line of products that turn out to be "lemons". I seriously doubt their lack of quality stands out in the crowd of mainstream PC manufacturers. I've read service horror stories about all of them. You want quality, build your own, and do it right.
cjs150 - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
Poor value for the price.AIO water coolers have become a fashion accessory. In most cases a high end air cooler will do the job just as well for less money. Now if they had built a machine which water cooled both CPU and GPU I could answer the price and the choice of case
spigzone - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
These prebuilt boutique computer reviews never made sense to me.So you go online and order up your choice of a case, cpu, gpu, memory, hdd, ssd and power supply - which continually change and evolve over time.
Seems like a meaningless waste of time and manpower better spent on meaningful component reviews.
willis936 - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
While I agree with the other comments about the component selection not fitting the price bracket (these parts would be aiming closer to a $1400 build) I will stand by their choice to use manual voltage in the OC. I'm going through the 4770k OC circuit right now and I have a successful delid under my belt. What I'm finding is that while using offset or adaptive voltage you'll see massive Vccin spikes under AVX workloads. Massive as in I'm putting in 1.325v and 1.475 is coming out. Yowzers. But wait! No one uses AVX. Well, they do. Especially if you play emulators. Using a few more watts (I say a few because an idle 4770k even at 1.3V runs on 10-20W) is well worth it compared to the prospect of shipping an unstable OC.JimmiG - Friday, August 23, 2013 - link
AVX is probably the reason why they limited the overclock to 4.2 GHz. A factory-overclocked system needs to be able to handle anything they throw at it, no exceptions, at room temperatures that might be higher than optimal. An unstable factory OC would add massively to their costs and damage their reputation. It's better to give up ~200 MHz.The screen shot in the review shows 81C, but it doesn't state what kind of stress tests were run. The new killer test is Linpack 11 with AVX2, which can easily push even a moderately overclocked CPU into the mid 90's range and requires significantly higher voltages than Aida64 or IBT. Even the FPU-only test in Aida64 can push some really high temps at anything above 1.15 - 1.20V.
Finally, like willis936 sais, using dynamic voltages will cause unpredictable behavior. Finding an adaptive voltage that works for a particular CPU is a long and frustrating process. In some cases it may be impossible to achieve an offset that gives you a high-enough voltage with non-AVX loads while simultaneously keeping the "AVX-boosted" voltage within reason.
Drittz121 - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Just do yourself a favor. STAY AWAY from this company. Yes they look good. But when it breaks and it WILL. All they do is give you the run around. They have had my system for over 2 months trying to fix the garbage they sell. Worse company out there for support. DONT BUY