CyberPowerPC's Gamer Xtreme 4000: Now with Sandy Bridge

Build, Noise, Heat, and Power Consumption

I'll come clean and say I'm just not a fan of the cases CyberPower has used for the builds we've tested here. Understanding that cases are arguably one of the safest corners to cut, these have nonetheless felt both cheap and gaudy compared to the competition. The Thermaltake Armor A60 is a step up from the XION Predator they used for the Gamer Xtreme 8500 we tested, but my experience has been that more austere cases like the Antec Sonata, P180 series, and Corsair's cases exhibit superior noise characteristics while generally just looking better.

Having said that, the A60 seems to be one of the only corners that's been cut here. Everything else is fairly top shelf and actually looks to embarass the DigitalStorm BlackOps we reviewed recently. CyberPower opts to include higher quality Kingston HyperX RAM than the A-Data DigitalStorm used, and the connectivity on both the ASUS P8P67 motherboard and the case itself is superior. About the only thing missing is an SSD as a boot drive; with decent SSDs hovering around the $100 price point now it's difficult but not impossible to excuse. If CyberPower actually does meet the $1,399 quoted price we were given, the Gamer Xtreme 4000 looks to be a hell of a deal.

For once I'm not going to gripe too much about the overclock, either. While voltages haven't been changed at all in EFI (the P8P67 finally makes the jump from BIOS to EFI), nothing's been disabled or fixed to get that 4.4GHz turbo clock. CyberPower's builders just set the turbo ratio to 44x and called it a day, leaving all the motherboard's voltages at auto. It's not ideal, but at least the processor idles at a low voltage (and thus draws little power) and again, nothing was left disabled like in the other boutique builds we've tested. As a result, the Gamer Xtreme 4000 draws just 91 watts while idling, though that shoots up to a measured 373 watts under heavy load. Overall these figures aren't bad; for comparison my tower with an overclocked and undervolted Intel Core i7-930 and AMD Radeon HD 5870 idles at 190 watts (three monitors jack up the clocks on the 5870) and hits 320 watts under load. The load difference of 53 watts can be attributed to the GTX 570's higher power consumption along with the lack of finer voltage tuning on the i7-2600K.

Editor's Note: As this is the first encounter with Sandy Bridge for Dustin, it's a little tough to determine whether this particular overclock is good, average, lazy, etc. In retrospect, it looks like setting the max Turbo to 4.4GHz is pretty darn easy, and even conservative given the aftermarket cooling. Anand's 2600K testing got up to 4.4GHz using the stock Intel cooler, for instance. But without a bit more experience, it's still difficult to say how much more enthusiasts will wring out of Sandy Bridge, so CyberPower is lucky enough to get a bit of a pass on this one. Note #2: CyberPowerPC has left a comment indicating that the OC was set to 4.4GHz for all Turbo modes—whether single-core or quad-core—and it appears that they did so conservatively. We certainly understand that, as this is brand new hardware and everyone is still getting to grips with SNB overclocking.

Noise isn't really an issue either. The watercooling keeps the processor running fairly cool (as you'll see in the HWMonitor screen cap below) while producing minimal noise, leaving the GeForce GTX 570 as the primary offender. That said, under load the fans don't spin up all that much and the system runs pretty quietly overall; a case with better acoustics would probably silence everything once and for all.

The peak 1.35V on the processor core is unattractive but not horrendous, and overall thermals are excellent. Again, I'm really just happy to see the comparatively low idle voltage which is at least an improvement over most of the other fixed voltage overclocks I've seen.