OT-CyberPower gaming PCs

[Bullwinkle58]

Looking to upgrade very soon. Reading reviews of the Black Pearl model from CyberPower, and it seems like a lot of box for the money. Alienware, Falcon and the other bigs seem overpriced on a component-to-component basis. CyberPower doesn't have the marketing and overhead they do (yet.)

My concerns are manufacturing QA, whether they come with full disks for all software installed and not boot disks talking to .cab files on the HD (which are gone in a disk crash), and if the buying experience is smooth or one-horse.

I don't want to build my own; I'm looking just for info and opinions on this brand, either the Black Pearl or any of their other gaming-oriented models.

Anyone?

[Herrbear]

Don't know about CyberPower. Bought my new one from DigitalStorm and very pleased with it.

[Misconduct]

I have a cyberpowered PC, although they do have excellent designs mine did come with a few flaws, for one they installed the harddrives backwards, (meaning second hard had windows not primary) and secondly neither were on raid which required a complete format, although a day of time consuming I couldn't of asked for a better PC, Its around 6 years old - unfortunately my mobo died recently, I can't say anything bad about CyberPowered though.

I would recommend them, although just make sure everything is correct when you receive it, also their tech support isn't all the best in the world, granted its not easy to fix a problem you can't see.

[Misconduct]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

Looking to upgrade very soon. Reading reviews of the Black Pearl model from CyberPower, and it seems like a lot of box for the money. Alienware, Falcon and the other bigs seem overpriced on a component-to-component basis. CyberPower doesn't have the marketing and overhead they do (yet.)

My concerns are manufacturing QA, whether they come with full disks for all software installed and not boot disks talking to .cab files on the HD (which are gone in a disk crash), and if the buying experience is smooth or one-horse.

I don't want to build my own; I'm looking just for info and opinions on this brand, either the Black Pearl or any of their other gaming-oriented models.

Anyone?

Missed one of your questions, the cyberpowered PC's do come with full disks for all software installed, operating system, and all key parts to the computer, for example if you buy an ASUS motherboard, you will get the disk for it

This was one of the main key's I bought it however this was a few years ago so you might want to ask them.
But I did get all the software disks which comes to around 15 or so, which was nice - my netbook I bought didn't come with anything at all, not even the Microsoft starter cd (although it does not even have a Cd player, they still could of gave me a 1GB flash drive or something with the drivers on it.

I would call and Ask them to be 100% sure, as again mine was bought over 5 years ago.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Herrbear

Don't know about CyberPower. Bought my new one from DigitalStorm and very pleased with it.

I'll take a look at them. Thanks.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Misconduct

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

Looking to upgrade very soon. Reading reviews of the Black Pearl model from CyberPower, and it seems like a lot of box for the money. Alienware, Falcon and the other bigs seem overpriced on a component-to-component basis. CyberPower doesn't have the marketing and overhead they do (yet.)

My concerns are manufacturing QA, whether they come with full disks for all software installed and not boot disks talking to .cab files on the HD (which are gone in a disk crash), and if the buying experience is smooth or one-horse.

I don't want to build my own; I'm looking just for info and opinions on this brand, either the Black Pearl or any of their other gaming-oriented models.

Anyone?

Missed one of your questions, the cyberpowered PC's do come with full disks for all software installed, operating system, and all key parts to the computer, for example if you buy an ASUS motherboard, you will get the disk for it

This was one of the main key's I bought it however this was a few years ago so you might want to ask them.
But I did get all the software disks which comes to around 15 or so, which was nice - my netbook I bought didn't come with anything at all, not even the Microsoft starter cd (although it does not even have a Cd player, they still could of gave me a 1GB flash drive or something with the drivers on it.

I would call and Ask them to be 100% sure, as again mine was bought over 5 years ago.

Thanks. This is excellent feedback.

I went to their site after reading the reviews at this site

http://computers.toptenreviews.com/gaming/index.htm

where they are the #1 gaming box of the top 24. Some of the brands I've heard of, but a lot not. That sector of the PC market has always been "out there" since the customers tend to be deeply knowing and capable of building their own if they want to. Some brands, like Alienware and Falcon Northwest, I've watched for 10-15 years as they began as enthusiast start-ups, were bought by one of the titans, and then had their fervor watered-down by corporate marketing and premiums on commodity components due to their branding. My gaming PC for over seven years now is a Dell XPS, but they've really been run over in the gaming sector (and bought Alienware to try to address that.) You can't stick a fast video card in a business desktop and call it a gaming machine.

The having-the-disks thing is a key peeve of mine as it's only gotten worse as margin competition has become fierce. I've never had a box where I haven't had to take it down to bare metal and re-format/re-OS it at least once. HDs fail too.

I've been out of the buying market for so long I have dust on me. Reading about 1000-watt power supplies, dual video cards Crossfired together, and solid-state HDs makes me feel like I landed my Sopwith Camel at an F-15 base. I'm just at the beginning of my research, and money is very tight, but I'll have this next one at least five years and I don't want to make a bad buy.

Thanks for the help.

[witpqs]

Yo, Antlered One!

A German security firm several years ago put out a free product called Offline Update to help folks keep their Windows updated. Basically sysadmins could use it to make a disk with a whole mess of Microsoft patches on it and apply them all at once, say to new or re-imaged PC's.

If you have done the bare-metal thing as you note, you certainly know how many download-reboot-download-reboot-ad infinitum cycles you go through getting up to the latest patches with Microsoft. So this Offline Update product is also useful for home users because when you do the bare-metal thing first you make a Offline Update disk. Then after you load Windows from disk, you apply the Offline update disk, saving yourself hours of attended and semi-attended download-reboot cycles.

I looked for the current link and found that the firm, Heise Online (at "http://www.heise.de/"), has spun off the product into an open source project. You can now find it at "http://www.wsusoffline.net/".

It's also useful to keep with your backup stuff because it will get you up and running faster in the event of any type of bare-metal reload such as a disk failure or a security breach.

Hope this helps some.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

Yo, Antlered One!

A German security firm several years ago put out a free product called Offline Update to help folks keep their Windows updated. Basically sysadmins could use it to make a disk with a whole mess of Microsoft patches on it and apply them all at once, say to new or re-imaged PC's.

Hope this helps some.

I will take a look at this too. Thanks. Lots of research to do!

[Misconduct]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

ORIGINAL: Misconduct

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

Looking to upgrade very soon. Reading reviews of the Black Pearl model from CyberPower, and it seems like a lot of box for the money. Alienware, Falcon and the other bigs seem overpriced on a component-to-component basis. CyberPower doesn't have the marketing and overhead they do (yet.)

My concerns are manufacturing QA, whether they come with full disks for all software installed and not boot disks talking to .cab files on the HD (which are gone in a disk crash), and if the buying experience is smooth or one-horse.

I don't want to build my own; I'm looking just for info and opinions on this brand, either the Black Pearl or any of their other gaming-oriented models.

Anyone?

Missed one of your questions, the cyberpowered PC's do come with full disks for all software installed, operating system, and all key parts to the computer, for example if you buy an ASUS motherboard, you will get the disk for it

This was one of the main key's I bought it however this was a few years ago so you might want to ask them.
But I did get all the software disks which comes to around 15 or so, which was nice - my netbook I bought didn't come with anything at all, not even the Microsoft starter cd (although it does not even have a Cd player, they still could of gave me a 1GB flash drive or something with the drivers on it.

I would call and Ask them to be 100% sure, as again mine was bought over 5 years ago.

Thanks. This is excellent feedback.

I went to their site after reading the reviews at this site

http://computers.toptenreviews.com/gaming/index.htm

where they are the #1 gaming box of the top 24. Some of the brands I've heard of, but a lot not. That sector of the PC market has always been "out there" since the customers tend to be deeply knowing and capable of building their own if they want to. Some brands, like Alienware and Falcon Northwest, I've watched for 10-15 years as they began as enthusiast start-ups, were bought by one of the titans, and then had their fervor watered-down by corporate marketing and premiums on commodity components due to their branding. My gaming PC for over seven years now is a Dell XPS, but they've really been run over in the gaming sector (and bought Alienware to try to address that.) You can't stick a fast video card in a business desktop and call it a gaming machine.

The having-the-disks thing is a key peeve of mine as it's only gotten worse as margin competition has become fierce. I've never had a box where I haven't had to take it down to bare metal and re-format/re-OS it at least once. HDs fail too.

I've been out of the buying market for so long I have dust on me. Reading about 1000-watt power supplies, dual video cards Crossfired together, and solid-state HDs makes me feel like I landed my Sopwith Camel at an F-15 base. I'm just at the beginning of my research, and money is very tight, but I'll have this next one at least five years and I don't want to make a bad buy.

Thanks for the help.

I am the same way don't worry, I bought mine for $2000 and it was my limit - I wanted something I could play a newer game on if needed, but so far nothing decent has come out with high end graphics that were needed. I have an SLI setup and so far everything has been great except for the ASUS motherboard, some reason it died after 5-6 years but at the time it was a $350 board and one of the top of the line SLI boards.

They do put some secondary products into their machines, for example I have two XFX Gforce video cards which I had no clue who they were at the time, it was basically a chinese knock off and turned out pretty darn good considering the Nvidia cards were over $150 more. Overall I give them a 8 out of 10, the customer service was great, but tech support was a little shabby since my original problem took 4-5 hours to fix but they did help me out.

Considering the Budget, only an idiot would buy an Alienware when you have companies like Cyberpowered that can give you the same setup for half the cost.

[Sredni]

If you can hold off for another year you might want to do so. There's a new socket cpu coming into production mid-late 2011 (supposedly if nothing goes wrong I guess heh) and that'll shake things up. LGA 2011 amusingly enough is what it's called, it'll be filling the LGA 1366 market. Once it's in production the lga 1366 stuff should hopefully come down in price, but it will also make motherboards, cpu's and perhaps ram based on lga 1366 a dead end.

That said once the lga 2011 stuff appears I'll probably still be wringing my hands and saying "omg hold off a year till all the bugs are ironed out!" heh. It's a never ending waiting period if we wait for the next new thing or the latest round of bugs.

The SSD's are still having teething problems too and they might have better options within the year.

I think the video card in the machine you linked has it's next generation coming out soon as well although last I read about the radeons was ages ago and it might be out already who knows heh. I havn't really paid attention to that series tbh, when I get my next computer I was planning on an nvidia chip card (x580 type) rather then a ati radeon type. edit: In fact... I think the card in that machine is the next generation radeon series. not sure, I didn't think it was out yet. if so I have no advice to give on video cards, I'm out of the loop now.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58

ORIGINAL: Herrbear

Don't know about CyberPower. Bought my new one from DigitalStorm and very pleased with it.

I'll take a look at them. Thanks.

OK, I have now, and they seem like a very well-run company that's going to be around awhile. Also, some of their customer feedback has some very bad things to say about dealings with CyberPower.

Arrgh.

DigitalStorm, like CyberPower, allows customization of components to the Nth degree, and I'm not up on current mobos, HDs, RAM, or even leading edge keyboards or mice. It's becoming apparent that I have a lot of component-level research to do as well.

It's also becoming apparent that I can't afford what I want (what else is new in this world?), so I need to triage. Heat-management is pretty close to the top in the enviro where I run my PC, so I need to understand if liquid-cooling is worth the hefty upcharge for me, or if I can get away with spending on beefier fans. The other thing I don't grasp yet is just how much percieved performance experience you get from two video cards versus one pretty good, but not bleeding edge, one. I do pay some graphic intense games like Fallout, but I'm not a FPS twitch junky. (Several decades past being able to compete in that space.)

If it were just AE I could get an off-the-shelf office desktop at Amazon or BestBuy and be fine, but I do play other games, and sometimes watch DVDs on the desktop.

Decisions, decisions.

I'd say that after looking at both CyberPower and DigitalStorm's sites I feel marginally more comfortable with the business practices and support at DS. Their product segmentaiton strategy seems pretty logical and easy to navigate, and the customization process the same. The only thing I wish they had was a running total on the box you're building, without the need to tart it up and then go to the front end of the order process to see what price you're up to, then back to pare it down. But it's a well-designed, crisp site.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Sredni

If you can hold off for another year you might want to do so. There's a new socket cpu coming into production mid-late 2011 (supposedly if nothing goes wrong I guess heh) and that'll shake things up. LGA 2011 amusingly enough is what it's called, it'll be filling the LGA 1366 market. Once it's in production the lga 1366 stuff should hopefully come down in price, but it will also make motherboards, cpu's and perhaps ram based on lga 1366 a dead end.

That said once the lga 2011 stuff appears I'll probably still be wringing my hands and saying "omg hold off a year till all the bugs are ironed out!" heh. It's a never ending waiting period if we wait for the next new thing or the latest round of bugs.

The SSD's are still having teething problems too and they might have better options within the year.

I think the video card in the machine you linked has it's next generation coming out soon as well although last I read about the radeons was ages ago and it might be out already who knows heh. I havn't really paid attention to that series tbh, when I get my next computer I was planning on an nvidia chip card (x580 type) rather then a ati radeon type.

I wish I could wait, for financial reasons as much as technical, but I can't. I had four heat-related crashes just this past week. I think I have an intermittent fan failure (from Mark I ears) in my box, but I have an auxiliary desk-fan blowing air into the box's home so it's hard to tell. My current box has, I think, five fans of various sizes and noise-levels. Dell seven years ago (the box was probably designed nine or ten ago) was a far more robust engineering company than the shell it is now. I can't complain about what I've gotten from Bessie. It's been on at least 40 hours a week for seven years, in gaming mode for at least half of that. That's a lot of boot cycles and heat stress.

As you say, with PC tech you never get to a resting point. It's always one upgrade cycle or the other coming soon, and then a bug hunt period, and then the other component is in upgrade, etc, etc. I've been buying home machines since the Apple IIe, and it never stops. The graphic card wars have subsided somewhat, and the CPU clock-speed race-to-the-moon of the Pentium era is long over, but change is still rapid.

I'm not going to even look at solid-state primary HDs this go-round. I think there are bugs to work out, and they're still at the bottom of the cost-curve. I can get another terrabyte of old-tech HD for less than an 80G solid-state, and I don't see the HD as a bottleneck for what I do, assuming I have enough RAM. (Buying a second VERY expensive gig of RAM for Bessie back then is the only thing that's kept her able to even load games like Fallout New Vegas.)

I've always had ATI Raedons as that was Dell's bed-partner for ages, but this time I'm open to the other side of the fence. I think the driver process has really shaken out in the past three years or so, and it's more a matter of taste now. I think nVidia is slightly favored by game designers for a dev environment, but I could be wrong. ATI seems to me more wedded to the One Giant Card route than multitasking several in parallel. But I haven't looked very deeply yet.

[Sredni]

At first I was really ready to hop on the SDD bandwagon but reading more on them and their problems with slowdown over time (they can become slower then HDD after prolonged use) I'm kinda meh. I agree, I don't think they're worth the expense and bother at this time. They have a software solution in place now to mitigate this slowdown but I'm not really impressed by this first crack at solving the issue. Well... mostly I'm just not impressed by the fact that the slowdown occurs at all heh.

I'ma gonna stick with 2 quality HDD in raid 0 for my next pc probably. Well, I was going to anyways for the programs and games drive, but I had planned to try the SDD's out for a boot drive until I dug a little deeper into their workings.

When I last checked out video cards the GTX580 was outpreforming the HD cards with lower heat levels and less power draw. For a little bit more price heh. That was a good 3 or 4 months ago now though so I dunno what the latest is. Especially if the latest version of the HD series is out now. I can't remember if the HD 5xxx stuff was what I was comparing to or not.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Sredni

At first I was really ready to hop on the SDD bandwagon but reading more on them and their problems with slowdown over time (they can become slower then HDD after prolonged use) I'm kinda meh. I agree, I don't think they're worth the expense and bother at this time. They have a software solution in place now to mitigate this slowdown but I'm not really impressed by this first crack at solving the issue. Well... mostly I'm just not impressed by the fact that the slowdown occurs at all heh.

I'ma gonna stick with 2 quality HDD in raid 0 for my next pc probably. Well, I was going to anyways for the programs and games drive, but I had planned to try the SDD's out for a boot drive until I dug a little deeper into their workings.

When I last checked out video cards the GTX580 was outpreforming the HD cards with lower heat levels and less power draw. For a little bit more price heh. That was a good 3 or 4 months ago now though so I dunno what the latest is. Especially if the latest version of the HD series is out now. I can't remember if the HD 5xxx stuff was what I was comparing to or not.

I hadn't even heard of solid-state HDs until yesterday.[:)] What you say pushes me even farther away from considering one in the mix. I'm not sure RAID anything is worth it for me. I'm very rigorous about backups, and I like my second (in Bessie I have 3) HD to be free-standing, for music primarily. I'll have to look into speed losses though with the Big 3 (CPU, RAM, video.) One reaosn I don't build my own is fearing that one component wrong move gets you a bottleneck that trashes the whole investment's speed increase. I'll pay an engineer to work through driver incompats for me; I'd rather use my time for games.

DS's site customization window on video cards is very long, and very spec-packed. Just looking at upcharges it's clear I don't know where the price-performance drop-off is for my budget. Pretty sure I'll put the most I can into video, and scrimp elsewhere. Probably lower-end dual nVidias I think, but we'll see. I also need to buy a modern monitor before this is done.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: Bullwinkle58


The only thing I wish they had was a running total on the box you're building, without the need to tart it up and then go to the front end of the order process to see what price you're up to, then back to pare it down.

EDIT: They do have one. (headslap) It looks like an ad over on the right margin of the customization page, but it's a running total mini-page. Very useful. With that, I'd say their build-a-box page is probably the best I've seen. Makes Dell's look like it was designed by a 3-YO.

[witpqs]

Regarding overheating - you have already taken the PC outside with the cover off and used canned air to blow out all the dust, right? I mean being careful a) not to freeze (and crack) any of the components, b) not to blow off any of the components by getting to close with the nozzle, and c) paying particular attention to the heat sinks, especially the one(s) connected to the CPU(s) by getting really close to each and every vane on them and blowing the crap out of any dust with the temerity to try to hang on.

Sure you might be having a fan problem, but if you haven't cleaned out the beast yet you might be amazed at the difference.

[witpqs]

I've been reading about the solid state drives lately and the latest and best have changed the deal from the earlier ones. Unless you get one a small firm has cobbled together you really shouldn't run into any slowing down. And some of the newer ones are reported to have an MTBF of about 1,000,000 hours.

[Bearcat2]

Newegg sells cyberpower, reading their customer reviews can help, especially if it is a model you are looking at.

[stuman]

This is a very interesting thread. It sounds like I am in the exact spot as you are Bullwinkle. I have a 6 year old Dell XPS that was pricey at the time, but has given great service. Virtually no problems in all of these years even though it has been in constant use the entire time by me, wife, teenagers, etc. But it is dying on me ( sniff ).

I have been on a low level research-before-buy hunt for about six months, and am reaching the same conclusions. I had stumbled upon both sites mentioned above as well.

Anyway thanks for all of the input. This has been helpful.

[Bullwinkle58]

ORIGINAL: witpqs

Regarding overheating - you have already taken the PC outside with the cover off and used canned air to blow out all the dust, right? I mean being careful a) not to freeze (and crack) any of the components, b) not to blow off any of the components by getting to close with the nozzle, and c) paying particular attention to the heat sinks, especially the one(s) connected to the CPU(s) by getting really close to each and every vane on them and blowing the crap out of any dust with the temerity to try to hang on.

Sure you might be having a fan problem, but if you haven't cleaned out the beast yet you might be amazed at the difference.

A cleaning is in order for Monday. I expect to find most of a cat in there. But that won't fix everything. Bottomline is it's just a very old computer, and I game for my main hobby.