Introducing the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme 4000

We last checked in with CyberPowerPC's gaming desktop division when we reviewed the Gamer Xtreme 8500, which packed a beefy Intel Core i7-875K overclocked to 3.8GHz alongside two NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450s in SLI. Our feelings were decidedly mixed: while it was certainly fast enough, the gulf between the quoted price tag and the actual price along with the hack overclocking job made us question the system's value. Now CyberPowerPC has sent us a gaming desktop with the reasonably new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570 and a brand spanking new Intel Core i7-2600K that features the highest clock speed of any processor we've ever tested in a system.

Knowing the new Intel Core i7 based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is one of the fastest processors you can buy, what happens when we take the best clock-for-clock performance on the market and crank it up to 4.4GHz?

The elephant in the room is the overclocked Intel Core i7-2600K. Built on a 32nm fabrication process, it's Intel's new top of the line mainstream processor using the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and features 8MB of L3 cache and a nominal turbo speed of 3.8GHz. Given the changes in how Sandy Bridge chips are overclocked, the unlocked multiplier is necessary to get the most out of these new processors. CyberPower has accordingly ramped the turbo multiplier to 44x, yielding a final turbo speed of a staggering 4.4GHz. The new i7 is cooled using CyberPower's standard Asetek 510LC liquid cooling which keeps idle temperatures extremely low.

Supporting the i7-2600K is Intel's new P67 chipset, which features both SATA 6Gbps and 3Gbps connectivity, the former of which is connected to the bog standard Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB drive. The chipset and processor only support dual channel memory, resulting in a board maximum of 16GB of DDR3; the 4GB of Kingston HyperX installed runs at a very healthy 1600MHz. The rest of the motherboard offers all of the modern connectivity you could ask for, including an interesting surprise in the form of integrated bluetooth.

Finally we also have the SuperClocked model of eVGA's NVIDIA GeForce GTX 570. In our review of the GTX 570 we found it to be about as fast as the former king of the hill GeForce GTX 480. Not too shabby, and now with eVGA's SuperClocked model we see a 60MHz bump in core clock (resulting in an effective 120MHz boost on the shader clock); memory speed is unchanged. Nonetheless, the 570 also sports a healthy 480 of NVIDIA's CUDA cores along with improved thermals and power consumption over the previous generation.

Rounding things out are a blu-ray reader/DVD writer combo drive and a respectable if unexciting Thermaltake Armor A60 case. A nice surprise comes in the form of the Corsair 650TX power supply, generally regarded as one of the best brands on the market. 

Application and Futuremark Performance

We already know how powerful the Intel Core i7-2600K is on its own, but what happens when we take it up a notch? The 2600K purring at the heart of the Gamer Xtreme 4000 runs at a 4.4GHz turbo speed (kept nice and cool by the Asetek liquid cooler), and this is well beyond the overclocks on the other test systems we've used. The Xtreme 8500 and DigitalStorm BlackOps are both running their last-generation i7s at a still respectable 3.8GHz, but as you'll see that's nowhere near enough to catch up to the demon inside the 4000.

The PCMark tests are notoriously biased toward SSDs, and since all of the other test towers come with SSDs for the system drive the standard mechanical drive in the CyberPower 4000 can't keep up. Once you get past those tests, though, the overclocked i7-2600K blows by the other processors. They can't even put up a fight: a 600MHz clock speed advantage on a more efficient architecture is just too much.

Oddities in Futuremark benches don't just stop at the PCMark tests, though, as you'll see when we run the 4000 through our suite of 3DMark tests.

Amazingly only 3DMark03 proves not to be CPU-limited; in every other case the overclocked i7-2600K pushes the CyberPower 4000 past the other machines. When we move on to our gaming benchmarks, though, we'll see things start to fall in line again.

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.

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. 

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.