Cyberpower Gamer Ultra 7209 Budget Desktop PC

Oct 21 2009 - If you are a gamer and on a tight budget, Cyberpower's Gamer Ultra 7209 offers a good general experience for a gaming platform as long as you aren't reaching for the highest levels of detail and resolutions. The performance is certainly above what most companies are offering in terms of Intel processors in this price range. It would be nice to see them include better a better keyboard and mouse as neither of these is really suitable for gaming or extended use.

Oct 21 2009 - While Intel may be king of the processor market right now, their prices and performance in the lower part of their product lineup leave much to be desired. Because of this, Cyberpower decided to use the new AMD Athlon II X2 240 dual core processor for the Gamer Ultra 7209. This processor is essentially a scaled down version of the Phenom processor running at relatively higher clock speeds. Performance is consistently equal to or better than Intel's Pentium Dual Core processors.

Gaming is not really possible with integrated graphics solutions found on most desktop PCs. The Gamer Ultra 7209 comes equipped with an ATI Radeon HD 4550 dedicated graphics card with 512MB of memory. This will allow the system to play current PC games at modest resolutions (1680x1050) at medium to lower detail levels. Definitely a step up from most desktop PCs in the $500 price range.

Storage features of the Gamer Ultra 7209 are pretty much what is expected in the budget desktop market. The 500GB hard drive provides enough space for applications, games and data while keeping the costs down. The system does use a slightly faster 22x dual layer DVD burner but most people probably won't notice the mere seconds that it saves over the 16x speed drives.

The case on the Gamer Ultra 7209 is a Raidmax Hurricane mid-tower case that is larger than traditional mini-tower cases used in desktop PCs. This provides the system with extra space for drives. It should be noted thought that some of the drive bays when is use will cover a few of the motherboard connectors making them difficult to use.

For system that is designed for gaming, the keyboard and mouse supplied with the Gamer Ultra 7209 leave much to be desired. They are decent enough for basic use but their layout and design are not well suited towards extended usage while playing PC games.