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
Conclusion: Great at $1,399
With the CyberPower Gamer Xtreme 4000 we potentially run into the same problem we had with their 8500: we were quoted a substantially lower price tag than the one that actually made it to market. At the quoted price the 8500 was a fine deal, while the actual price was a lot less inspiring. The 4000 is an improvement, but that's only if they can hit the low $1,399 price.
That said, the complaints leveled at the 4000 are mild compared to other boutique builds. The case feels a little chintzy and isn't the best-looking one available by a long shot, but it does offer solid connectivity that CyberPower further augments with a standard media reader. This is rounded out by the excellent motherboard choice in the form of the ASUS P8P67, which has all the modern (and legacy!) ports you could ask for and frankly embarasses the DigitalStorm BlackOps that costs more than twice as much.
I would've liked to have seen an SSD as the OS drive now that even an Intel X25-V (last seen in the Xtreme 8500) can be had for under $100, but that's not a tremendous strike against the 4000—you can always add one on your own down the road. And finally, the overclock on the i7-2600K is an improvement over other boutique builds both in terms of the clock speed available on Sandy Bridge, but some more finely-grained voltage tuning wouldn't have hurt. 1.35V at peak load isn't horrible but it's not really great, either. We'll have to see what other vendors can manage with SNB in the coming months.
The flipside to all of this is that the overclocked Intel Core i7-2600K is ridiculously fast, and the eVGA SuperClocked NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 is an excellent choice to pair with it. Single-monitor gamers are liable to get their money's worth out of this build, but again, that's assuming CyberPower hits that $1,399 price point. Breaking down the overall cost if you were to try and assemble this system from NewEgg, you're looking at nearly $700 just for the video card and processor alone. Tack on an extra $100 each for the power supply, cooling, and case, and we're already at a grand. That's before you get to the blu-ray drive, hard drive, memory, and motherboard.
We're left with an excellent representative of both Intel's new architecture and how good a boutique desktop deal can get. The Gamer Xtreme 4000 isn't perfect, but it's fairly sound and would be easy enough to recommend even at $1,499. If they're able to make it available at $1,399 and you're not interested in building your own machine, I see no reason not to go for it.
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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.