CyberPower: 4.0 GHz QX9770 and SLI GTX 280s
by Matt Campbell on August 22, 2008 4:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Systems
CyberPower - Ordering Impressions
CyberPower's website comes up immediately from a web search, as we like to see. Their current Reseller Rating is 7.97 for the last six months and 7.43 lifetime. As has been mentioned before, many factors must be taken into consideration besides the raw score, but often the customer feedback is useful to read through. Many posters did comment that they bought based on price and selection, and CyberPower had responded to and resolved several of the complaints.
CyberPower's website is better organized than some, but still has a huge array of choices. There are a large number of base system configurations (32 Intel, 29 AMD!), many of which are only slightly different from one another, and a huge number of individual options for each one of those systems.
Oddly enough, their cheapest "base" Intel configuration is in the Midrange PC menu at $699 (Gamer Infinity 8000 Dream), or their "Mega Special III" at $635. In fact, they have High-Performance selections that are cheaper than their entry-level machines! Choice is great, but if you choose to segregate by performance, the line should be a little clearer. At the high end of the spectrum is the Gamer Extreme XI starting at $5079, which is the model under review today. Note that the Gamer Extreme XI comes with two PSUs, just to make sure you have enough power to run a small third-world country.
Common with many PC vendors, freebies such as T-shirts, USB drives, and games are available for many configurations, but some also come with higher priced items such as printers. As you scroll through the choices, a system summary follows you on the right hand side updating price and specs as you go, which is nice. The "Help me choose" options are somewhat helpful; they provide a short list of primary specifications, but don't provide simple comparisons in a way that lets the consumer made a tradeoff decision. We also found them to have some questionable hardware combinations since most upgrades are offered across the board - like a 128 GB SSD for a $600 PC. We won't ding them for this since they're giving choice to the consumer, but again a little more segregation among performance levels would declutter and simplify the ordering experience.
Their telephone support number was very easy to find ("Contact Us"), which we appreciate, and is listed as 24/7, in addition to the "Live Chat" feature available during business hours. Their shipping was very reasonable ($14 FedEx Ground cross-country for one entry-level system) and was very easy to use without requiring a login or personal information as some other websites do.
A brief list of Pros and Cons regarding the website layout and content is as follows:
Pros
Website easy to find
Huge array of choices
Generally competitive pricing
Prominent support information
Fair shipping rates and easy calculation
Cons
Huge array of choices can be confusing
"Help me Choose" could be better
Could remove extreme options from entry-level builds
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agliboyph - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
for this kind of money, gat a maingear and live happily ever afterbill3 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
They get a lot of crap online, but I think people just like to whine. My brother bought a rig from them a while back and it's been nothing but great, and the price was great too, practically cheaper than you can build it yourself. And saves you the hassle, which as I age becomes a bigger factor, I dont really enjoy building my own PC's anymore, installing windows and all that crap.The customizability is what sets them apart, from buying a crap Dell or a PC from Best Buy or something imo. And the fact you can hand pick name brand quality components. The main downside imo is the 2 week build/ship time (newegg can have you parts to you in 2-3 days if you're building your own, and I like instant gratification).
But anyway, now on to my comments about this rig and away from general comments about cyberpower..my main complaint is for a 5k rig, this isn't nearly as extreme specced as you'd think it should be. Terabyte HDD's are rapidly nearing $99 nowdays, so you should get at least two of those imo (hell for 5 k, if not 3 or 4!). The fact you only get Vista Premium? Should get Ultimate befitting this monster rig. And then the RAM, I was browsing PC's in Best Buy the other day and noticed a "budget" $600 PC with 6GB RAM already! Granted it may be an overclocking thing or something, but this rig should come with 16GB RAM or something like that you'd think (8GB at the very least). Cant really argue with the video cards/PSU's though.
badputter - Sunday, August 24, 2008 - link
It isn't always folks that "just like to whine," I tried to buy what looked like a great deal on system from them about 8 years ago that turned me off of them completely.
This was back when the PIII was just moving to on-die cache...(back in the good old Slot 1 days...) Ordered a system with the on-die cache... system comes with the older version with external, half speed cache, that was about $40 cheaper to buy...
Call Customer service... generally took 30+ minutes to get through to anyone in their call center... system had other problems as well... just not stable... problem with the motherboard... could not work with anyone in customer service going up the chain. Finally ended up disputing the charge with Discover... Cyberpower never responded to Discover's dispute of the charge. Eventually they sent a prepaid shipping label to me to send the system back.
Had the system worked fine, I would have been a happy customer like your brother. I figured they could put it together for less than I could buy all the components... then they didn't ship me what I ordered... then they had lousy customer service and tech support...
They may have gotten better... or they may have found that the go for the cheap customer and hope for the best is more profitable...
Calin - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
They use two 1000W PSU for a system that uses less than 600W from the wall outlet? A single 1000W PSU should have been enough.HOOfan 1 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
If you look at some of their in magazine ads, they will often show a configuration like the system above with only a single 420W generic PSU.HOOfan 1 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Also to add, this system doesn't even use 600W in their test. They measure AC draw from the wall outlet. Assuming these Thermaltakes can be 83% at those lower loads. 5798 * .83 ~ 481 So the system isn't pulling any more than 500 Watts of DC in their tests. Considering PSUs are rated on DC output and not AC input, this system is only drawing ~25% of the theoretical power available to it.Christoph Katzer - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Wasty, They could have gone with two much smaller PSUs to keep load and therefore noise low on both. The two 1k units are not necessary and waste a lot of budget for the system. Too bad these companies have no idea how to choose sufficient power..bill3 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Oh and I forgot to mention one thing that amazed and made me envious of my brothers cyberpower..he got a windowed case and the cabling/routing they did was incredibly clean and minimal. I mean, no clutter whatsoever, just perfect. I'm just sloppy and stupid, but I hated staring at my cable clutter in my windowed PC for years (why I didn't buy a windowed case this time hehe)HotdogIT - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Remember the HardOCP reviews, where they tested the technical support? Yeah, I loved those, and miss those. Obviously it ended up killing their H-Consumer line, as it cost a lot of advertising dollars, but it was so unique, and special, and cool.You guys should do that. That's what I'm cleverly hinting at with my reminiscing.
Rev1 - Friday, August 22, 2008 - link
Yea that was great, it actually swayed me to purchase a comp from cyberpower because they had a few decent reviews on there.