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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JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
You never said "faster because if the 3% higher clock speed", you just said FASTER. It's not, and even at the same clocks it probably wouldn't make much of a difference. We're mostly GPU limited, but the larger cache (and possibly HTT, though that's unlikely) comes into play.There's no reason the 2500K should outperform 2600K; more cache and a slightly higher clock put it ahead, and the days of HTT actually reducing performance are mostly behind us. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if many of the differences are simply margin of error (which can easily be 2% if you're using FRAPS on a game like WoW).
As to the second assertion that calling something a "Gamer Xtreme" means it's only for gaming, that's ludicrous. I play lots of games, but I also happen to do plenty of image editing and video encoding. I probably spend as much time on Facebook and in other mundane tasks as I do in games, and yet I have a quad-core i7 with 5850 CrossFire. These days, PC gamers are very likely to do social networking as well, which means images and videos.
I still wouldn't spend $100 extra to get more cache and Hyper-Threading, at least not until I had an SSD in the build (and for gaming, probably a second GPU so I can use my 30" LCD at native res), but if you have everything else you need the 2600K isn't without merits.
Nentor - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Don't get all pedantic on me Jarred. You know perfectly well what I mean.Now I am just trying to figure out why someone, the editor even!, gets all feisty about this. That sort of thing feeds people claiming AT takes sides.
There may be no reason the 2500K should outperfom the 2600K, but it does as can be seen in the charts.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Taking sides in what sense? All I've said is that you're not actually telling the whole story, which is something you continue to do. Call me pedantic for pointing out the facts if you will, but my own experience is such that I'd rather have the extra logical cores of Hyper-Threading. And calling me "feisty" is pretty much a case of the pot calling the kettle black my friend. LOL ("No, I am right. Hold on a sec while I me put on my blinders to explain why....")I wish I had some SNB desktop hardware of my own to play with, because there are quite a few unanswered questions I'd like to investigate more. You bring up a few of them--what happens if you disable HTT on the 2600K? Why would the 2500K without HTT ever beat the 2600K with HTT? How far can you push 2500K overclocking vs. 2600K, and what sort of power requirements do you end up with? Is disabling HTT beneficial for overclocking in any way? Like I said, plenty of questions left unanswered.
I don't know if somehow there's some scheduling going on (suggested by risa2000 below) that gets in the way of performance in some games or what. I will say that I've never felt Windows' scheduler was all that impressive, and the way it appears to wake the CPU up all the time just to verify that no one needs work done is obvious when you look at what Apple achieves with battery life compared to Windows. Win7 is an improvement but it's by no means perfect. Let's hope for better in Windows 8.
Nentor - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Wow, excuse me for apparently misjudging the average level here at AT.I thought people here were smart enough to not need everything spelled out and not need every conclusion drawn out.
If two chips are compared one of which is 0.1ghz faster than the other and the slower one is faster than the faster one in 4 out of 10 games and the faster one is faster than the slower one in 6 out of 10 games with only a 2.3% advantage and based on that data someone calls the slower one faster overall it is pretty obvious what he means right? Or is that rocketscience right there?
strikeback03 - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Lets review a few facts here. These are probably ES chips (at least one of the ones Anand photographed was). That means there might be more variation in what they can handle than in production batches. Assuming Anand's tests were done with all normal features enabled, could be the gaming tests were sensitive to something like this particular example of a 2600K running warmer, and using turbo less. I haven't played with any of these and I doubt you have either, but after CES some of the editors probably will have a chance to answer some of these questionsSlyNine - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Rocket Science has a long way to go before it can decipher that dribble.They don't make upward shovels so quit before you end up in china.
risa2000 - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
Speaking about Starcraft 2 and 2600K drop mentioned in Sandy Bridge review: Could it be possible that SC2 in fact tries to utilize all 8 logical cores, but due to some implementation issues blocks a lot?It would be possible to test, if you could run SC2 on 2600K with only physical cores enabled (HT disabled) - though it is not probably worthy the time.
On the other side, it might be a "good" question to some Intel insider to explain this anomaly - which may also help developers to code "correctly" for HT enabled machine.
L. - Wednesday, March 16, 2011 - link
HT is bad for current games.if you activate HT on a 2600K and measure it against a 2500K you might see some issues :)
Again, fail PC . who the hell would OC their 2600k and STOP at 4.4 ??
Like hello, you can do 5 Ghz on air, why not just do it and be happy ?
For the same price I can get me a 5 ghz 2600k and a GTX580 so . again boutiques miss the point.
On the other side, I live in a world where the word "blu-ray" means "another failed optical media" and thus I can't appreciate this product to it's full extent ...
But seriously, why does no real geek work for these companies ?
NuclearDelta - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
This is the second time I saw them slammed. Are they really that bad?Nentor - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
People like to fool themselves.Oh it is cheap, so it must be bad. All the while forgetting that they think expensive is good only because they were learned that from a young age by marketing, etc. Some companies choose to do it another way. With the result they can sell high end ram for lower prices.
If you look at the reviews for the fast (and cheap!) A-Data ram on Newegg for example they are excellent pieces of hardware. There are enough people who are willing to look through brands and get the best from it.
4GB PC3 12800 for $48.99
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=20...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
etc. Great ratings.