It’s no secret that CyberPower offers gaming desktops ad infinitum; I counted more than 70 starting configurations on its website, and that’s exclusive of retailer-specific models like the Gamer Xtreme GXi11400CPG ($769.99 as tested). This budget-conscious midtower surprises with high-end touches such as a tempered glass window and a trio of remote-controlled RGB-lit fans, while its perky Intel Core i3 processor and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card make an ideal pairing for smooth 1080p gaming. Although it’s built well enough and provides satisfactory performance, it can’t quite unseat our Editors’ Choice pick for value gaming rigs, the NZXT BLD Starter PC Plus, which offers better performance and a longer warranty for not much more dosh.
Budget, But Not Ultra-Budget
The Gamer Xtreme GXi11400CPG is a preconfigured tower with a four-core, four-thread Intel Core i3-9100F processor (3.6GHz clock, up to 4.2GHz boost); a 6GB GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card; 8GB of DDR4-2400 memory; a 512GB PCIe solid-state drive; and Windows 10 Home. This caliber of components is mid-grade in the gaming-desktop world, as less expensive parts are available. (Namely, Intel’s Pentium-brand CPUs and Nvidia’s 4GB GeForce GTX 1650 Super or AMD’s Radeon RX 5500 XT.) That said, I would have preferred to see the GTX 1660 Super included for even better performance at minimal extra cost.
This CyberPower configuration holds its pricing ground next to the Dell G5 Gaming Desktop that I found on the Dell site for an identical price with the same basic hardware. A possible step up is the Asus ROG Strix GL10CS, which I found on Newegg for $849 with a faster Core i5-9400F CPU. NZXT’s BLD Starter PC is another rung up the ladder at $899, but further ups the ante with a GTX 1660 Super GPU, 16GB of RAM, and a longer two-year warranty.
To see what I could save if I built it myself, I shopped the CyberPower’s components as closely as possible on Newegg to the tune of $720, or only $50 less than its asking price. That’s just a small premium to pay for someone else to expertly assemble it, install a clean copy of Windows 10, and cover it all with a system warranty. If there’s an issue, you simply call CyberPower, whereas do-it-yourselfers would have to diagnose problems on their own and then deal with individual part vendors. CyberPower covers its tower with a one-year warranty on parts, three years on labor (you’d pay for replacement parts beyond the first year, but labor would be covered for two more years), and lifetime technical support.
Aftermarket Vibes
The Gamer Xtreme uses a CyberPower Onyxia chassis that’s very sturdy. Measuring 18.5 by 8.2 by 17.6 inches, it’s smack-dab in the middle ground for a midtower. The look is gamer without being garish.
The internal structure and most of the exterior panels are steel, while the front and left panels are tempered glass. The latter provides a clear view of the roomy interior…
The blacked-out inside looks much better than bare steel. It can have the side effect of making things too dark, but that’s not an issue with this Gamer Xtreme; its three 120mm fans are brightly lit in RGB colors and fun patterns.
There’s no software-level lighting control as I’d prefer, but CyberPower includes a wireless remote.
The four thumbscrews on the left side panel make interior access a simple affair. An Intel B360-based ASRock MicroATX motherboard is center stage…
It’s not strictly an off-the-shelf model, given that its heatsink bears the CyberPower logo, but it’s likely an ASRock B360 Pro4. (The case does look like it could take a full-ATX board, though.) One of my review unit’s four DIMM slots is filled with an 8GB ADATA XPG-brand memory module. I’d like to see more than that in a gaming desktop, but it would be simple to add more on your own. (Four 16GB DIMMs would hit the 64GB ceiling.) To the left of the memory slots, an Intel factory heatsink and fan top the Core i3-9100F CPU.
While not impressive-looking, this cooling setup is perfectly adequate, as I’ll detail later. Further below is the two-slot, two-fan MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ventus XS OC graphics card. It’s shorter than a normal card, but this tower clearly has no lack of space for accommodating longer ones.
Not visible in our photos is the M.2 slot under the graphics card that holds an Intel 9462 wireless card, which provides 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5. The included antennas (not connected in our photos) attach on the back of the motherboard. Moving onto storage, the Gamer Xtreme’s 512GB SSD resides just below the CPU in the motherboard’s M.2 Type-2280 slot. It’s the only storage drive in this configuration.
This tower supports up to four additional SATA drives. Two 2.5-inch drives, for which you’ll need to supply your own brackets, mount on top of the power supply compartment. Meanwhile, two 3.5-inch drives fit in a rack inside the compartment, complete with toolless slide-out caddies.
The bottom-mounted power supply is a 600-watt Thermaltake Smart series unit with an 80 Plus Gold certification. It doesn’t have modular cables that can be detached if they’re not used, but CyberPower does a tidy job of routing and tying off the unused ones.
Desktop Port Variety
The tower’s front edge has a pair of USB 3.1 Type-A ports and separate headphone and microphone jacks. I’d like to see a USB-C port and a media card reader up here for good measure.
Backside, the motherboard has four USB 3.1 ports (three Type-A and one Type-C), two USB 2.0 ports, and an Ethernet jack, plus headphone, line-in, and line-out audio jacks.
The motherboard’s HDMI port is disabled not only because of the Nvidia GTX 1660 (which has one HDMI and three DisplayPort video-out connectors), but also because the Core i3-9100F processor has no integrated graphics to fall back on. (That’s true of all “F”-suffix Intel CPUs.)
Ready Player One
Now we’ll put the Gamer Xtreme to the test in our benchmarking suite, where it will go head-to-head with the following units:
The quad-core CPUs in the CyberPower and HP will put them at a disadvantage in this lot, especially next to the eight-core Dell. Granted, those two are the least-expensive machines here. Things otherwise look good for the CyberPower, especially in GPU terms, although the NZXT’s GTX 1660 Ti is the fastest of the bunch. Nonetheless, let’s see how things play out.
Storage, Media, and CPU Tests
The CyberPower began with a strong placement in our PCMark 10 general performance benchmark, which simulates tasks like web browsing, office productivity, and video streaming. Scores above 4,000 points in that test are ideal. It also kept up nicely in the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark, where the HP was dragged down by its slow hard drive.
The next two tests extract maximum effort from the CPU by utilizing all available cores and threads. Cinebench R15 does so by rendering a complex image, while in Handbrake we encode a 12-minute clip of 4K video down to 1080p.
Cinebench reveals that the CyberPower’s Core i3-9100F four-core chip (which doesn’t support thread-doubling Hyper-Threading) isn’t quite a match for the HP’s older Ryzen 5, and it naturally can’t measure up to the higher-core-count chips in the other units in either test. It nonetheless deserves consideration (and maybe applause) for being the least-expensive CPU here, costing around $80 at retail. In my own usage, I found it offered plenty of pep for just about everything, rendering even complex websites almost instantly.
Our Adobe Photoshop test is the last one in this section. We use an early 2018 Creative Cloud release of the software to apply 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG image, timing each operation and adding up the total. This test more heavily leverages the computer’s memory, storage, and potentially its GPU in addition to the processor.
The CyberPower managed a respectable finish. The HP finished last mostly because of its slow storage, a deficiency the CyberPower doesn’t share.
Graphics Tests
We start this section with UL’s 3DMark suite; the Sky Diver test is for lighter-hitting systems with integrated graphics, while Fire Strike is aimed at high-performance PCs. Both tests simulate complex DirectX 11 scenes.
The CyberPower scored where it should, above the HP and Lenovo with their older (yet mainstream for their time) graphics cards while not quite catching the Dell, which teams the same GTX 1660 card with a much faster CPU. The NZXT and its GTX 1660 Ti made the top spot, as expected.
Our next test is another gaming simulator, Unigine’s Superposition. This even more demanding test uses a different rendering engine to provide a second opinion on a PC’s graphics performance. The CyberPower edged the Dell here to take the silver medal.
Finally but perhaps most importantly, we’ll test some real games. We use the built-in benchmarks in Far Cry 5 (at its Ultra image quality preset) and Rise of the Tomb Raider (at its Very High preset) at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions. Far Cry 5 uses DirectX 11, while we flip the Lara Croft adventure to DirectX 12. The results are measured in frames per second (fps); we look for at least 60fps for smooth playability.
The CyberPower’s numbers reveal it’s best suited for 1080p gaming, though it’s capable of venturing into 1440p territory. Lowering the settings just a bit from these demanding presets should yield 60fps at the higher resolution. As I noted earlier, the performance could be even better if this Gamer Xtreme used the newer GeForce GTX 1660 Super instead of the original GTX 1660, but the difference wouldn’t be earth-shattering.
This Gamer Xtreme’s biggest performance impediment is actually its 8GB of memory. I noticed some severe stuttering while playing Rise of the Tomb Raider and some short-term sluggishness after exiting the game, both telltale indicators that Windows 10 needs more memory. I didn’t have other apps running at the time, either. Upping the total to 16GB (a relatively easy and inexpensive aftermarket job) should mitigate that problem.
The quad-core/quad-thread processing power of the Core i3-9100F is another potential weak point, although it’s perfectly capable of modern gaming if you’re not putting too much extra load on it. It may be strained if you’re trying to livestream your games, for instance, a situation where a six- or eight-core CPU, plus AMD’s or Intel’s thread-doubling, would be worthwhile.
Colorful Cooling
The airflow in the Gamer Xtreme is simple yet efficient, with two 120mm fans drawing air in from the right side and another sending it out the rear. The noise level isn’t exactly quiet, but it’s muted enough to camouflage itself as background noise in most situations. Gaming for extended periods didn’t seem to increase the revs much, if at all, and I had to strain my ears to hear the fans on the CPU and graphics card.
The internal component temperatures were very good in my gaming sessions; my log showed the GTX 1660 topping out in the upper 60 degree C range, or far below its maximum rating. The Core i3-9100F fared even better, not going out of the 40 degree C range. This is one midtower that has no problem keeping its cool.
A Sensible Budget Gaming Pick
CyberPower’s knack for providing value is alive and well in the Gamer Xtreme GXi11400CPG. This midtower doesn’t skimp on premium features to provide all the performance needed for running today’s games at 1080p resolution. It could use more than 8GB of memory, but that’s not hard to add down the line. Our only real reservation with this tower is that the NZXT BLD Starter PC and its Plus variant provide substantially more performance and a longer warranty for not much more. But if your budget doesn’t take you that far, this CyberPower won’t make you wish you spent extra.
