CyberPowerPC's Gamer Xtreme 4000: Now with Sandy Bridge
by Dustin Sklavos on January 4, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- CyberPowerPC
- NVIDIA
Gaming Performance
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 in the CyberPower 4000 is no slouch, but it's facing tough competition from some of the other desktops we've tested. Keep in mind that the 4000 is also the least expensive desktop (or at least quoted least expensive) in our lineup, though. Starting with the "High" preset we'll see if the i7 can pick up some of the slack here, but we expect the 4000 to generally fall in about the middle of the pack.
Sure enough, the GTX 570 falls in line squarely where we expected, with the only win going to the notoriously CPU-limited, poorly-threaded StarCraft II. What possessed Blizzard to release a game that only scales up to two cores in 2010, we'll never know. Things should remain consistent when we bounce up to our "Ultra" preset, and hopefully that'll shift enough of the load to the graphics subsystem in StarCraft II to bring it in line.
As expected, everything places about where it's supposed to. The comparatively tame 3.5GHz overclock on the iBuyPower XLC is enough to strangle the SLI'd GTX 470s in that build in StarCraft II, but beyond that everything falls into place. Any of these systems are still incredibly fast, though. What we'd like to see is what would happen if a massively overclocked i7-2600K was paired with SLI'd GTX 580s; I had a sneaking suspicion that even a 3.8 GHz i7-950 was still going to be a little bit limiting on a graphics system that powerful, so it would be interesting to see if the 2600K could alleviate that bottleneck.
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ABR - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
You mention the motherboard in this box "made the jump" to EFI. Does that mean the graphics card in it supports EFI? I.e. it can be used unmodified in a MacPro?Gothmoth - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
don´t know what a EFI bios has to do with the GFX card.i have an EFI board and can put in a 3 year old 8800 GT card.
your problem is more likely that the apple crappis build only to run with certain cards.
Stuka87 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Your board most likely has BIOS emulation going on to allow the old card to run. As the are extensive differences between EFI and BIOS/CMOS. Cards not supporting EFI will not function on a board with EFI only.Boards that are EFI only, without any BIOS emulation, require their video cards to fully support EFI. This is one of the reasons graphics cards for MacPro's are not standard cards. It is believed once PC's decide to finally ditch BIOS/CMOS, that graphics cards will become standardized between the two, allowing for (comparitively) cheap MacPro video cards.
Kaboose - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Not a bad build over all, however it seems most games were gpu limited. Stepping down to a 2500k and lowering the price (or keeping it the same to avoid a price hike) would be a good choice for most gamers.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Right. I dont get why they used a 2600K at all since the 2500k is highly likely to overclock to the same 4.4GHz or perhaps even more due to disabled HT. $100 for 4 mostly unused threads and a 30% increase in cache seems like a waste next to a boot drive SSD. Especially if the IGP is disabled.Sihastru - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
2500K lacks HT and has 2MB of cache shaved off.Stuka87 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
HT has limited use anyway. A hyper threaded core will not perform anywhere close to as well as a real physical core. And if gaming is the main purpose of the box, anything over 4 cores is a waste anyway. And the 2MB difference in cache most likely would not have much of an effect either for the majority of games.And since this box is designed for gaming, the 2500K would most likely perform identically to the 2600K.
Nentor - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Actually if you look at the gaming benches in the SB review on AT you'll see that the 2500K is FASTER than the 2600K when it comes to gaming, so yeah, this is a weird choice Cyberpower made.Must be a marketing thing.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Let's not get carried away, there. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridg...i7-2600K comes out ahead in six of the ten games, and there are certainly titles that truly fail to leverage multithreading (hello StarCraft II!). The net difference across the ten tests Anand ran gives the 2600K a 2.3% advantage--negligible, I know, but that certainly doesn't make the 2500K FASTER as you suggest; nearly equal is more like it.
Besides, people do plenty of other things with their PC besides gaming. Video encoding (x264) was as much as 31% faster on the 2600K, and the compiler test took 31% less time. 7-Zip (MIPS) and POV-Ray also give the 2600K a >35% lead.
If all you want is a fast gaming system, 2500K is probably the best bang for the buck. If every little speed boost is important, though, and you regularly run some heavily threaded applications, 2600K can end up anywhere from 10% to 40% faster.
Nentor - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
No, I am right.The 2600K has a higher clock and that is the cause of the 2.3% advantage.
Either clock them the same and test or overclock them both as far as they go. I know which one I will put my money on, wanna bet?
This box is even called the "Gamer Xtreme", so it is obvious who it is buidl for.