IBUYPOWER Gamer Paladin F860-a

Problems

The iBUYPOWER Gamer Paladin F860-a had only a few minor problems during our testing period. The system was very stable and would complete hours of testing without issues. We upgraded the video drivers to 9.4 to avoid problems when testing Far Cry 2. In the noise section we mentioned the intermittent rattling that seemed to be coming from a zip tied cable routed behind the backplate, which was annoying when it occurred. These cables should be secured to avoid this. We also experienced a couple of issues with the LG DVD±RW. First, we had a read issue on one of our discs, where Autoplay would not work but instead would flag the following prompt:

Manually exploring the disc was very slow, and the drive got very noisy while doing so. However, it worked fine on other burned discs and with pressed media.

While the system was stable and ran games flawlessly, the above are big issues when it comes to customer perception of quality, and should be addressed. Also, just as we mentioned with CyberPower, iBUYPOWER offers so many choices in their configurations that the customer must take care to order a balanced solution. An uninformed buyer can order the Gamer Paladin F860-a with an ATI HD 3450 (crippling its performance), and the "Help me Choose" only lists specifications and gives no indication whatsoever of the kinds of performance sacrifices or gains of the various cards. Choice is great, but we'd like to see a few "Recommended" cards or a better explanation of how the video card choice will impact this "gaming" system. If it has Gamer in the name, it should be baselined to some minimum level of gaming performance.

Pricing

All of the components in this system price out for just about $1720 on Newegg.com. With a sticker price of $1975, iBUYPOWER has a margin of about 13% to cover a 3-year labor/1 year parts warranty, 30-day money back guarantee (not including shipping) and lifetime technical support. This margin is identical from the last time we looked at the pricing of one of their systems. This is a fairly reasonable markup for a preassembled system at this tier, but other companies are also cost competitive.

Final Thoughts

This is our second look at iBUYPOWER. For high-end systems, we recommended looking around at other suppliers, since they don't offer the "uniqueness" or handholding that buyers in that market enjoy. At the "upper midrange", we still find ourselves somewhat unimpressed. While the product is fairly solid with good component choices available, there's no single compelling factor that sells this system. The CyberPower Core i7-920 system outperformed this particular configuration in most areas for about $500 less. Both companies are very similar when it comes to warranty coverage limitations and customer service rankings (as well as product offerings, websites, etc. - they look like clones). We still feel iBUYPOWER is worth looking at for low- and mid-range systems, or higher end systems for more technical customers that want a prebuilt system at a low premium. However, if you're on the hunt for a low-margin prebuilt system, we continue to recommend competitively pricing out several suppliers prior to hitting that "Check Out" button. Choice is very good, so unless you're in a time crunch you may find a few extra hours of research can save you a lot of money.