Cyberpower Gamer Xtreme 1318 Mainstreadm Desktop PC

Aug 9 2011 - The Cyberpower Gamer Xtreme 1318 is a very good system for those looking to get into PC gaming without breaking the bank. It does sacrifice some features and upgrade potential in order to achieve its relatively low $800 price tag. While it may be suitable for those looking to use it for gaming, their are a few too many compromises to make it a solid general purpose system. For roughly the same price, you can get nearly the same performance with more features albeit with a lower grade graphics card.

- Cyberpower's Gamer Xtreme 1318 is a system that comes with an affordable price but tries to offer some solid performance. There are some tradeoffs made in the system in order to achieve its relatively low price tag of $800. In terms of processor, the Intel Core i5-2400 quad core processor offers some very solid performance. It is suitable for any type of task including PC gaming which seems to be the emphasis for this PC. The processors is matched up with 8GB of DDR3 memory that help it run smoothly. The downside is that the motherboard used in this system is limited to just two memory slots which are in use. This means that upgrading the memory is a more expensive as the existing memory would have to be dropped.

Storage features for the Cyberpower Gamer Xtreme 1318 are typical of an $800 desktop system. A one terabyte hard drive provides a fair amount of space for applications, data and media files. There are larger drives that can be found in this price segment but they typically are of the green variety. This means that they spin at a slower or variable rate to provide power savings. The drive in this system uses the more typical 7200rpm spin rate that offers a bit better performance. Also included with the system is a dual-layer DVD burner that handles playback or recording of CD or DVD media.

One big disappointment with the Game Xtreme 1318 is the peripheral ports. For a desktop system, it offers very few USB ports with just six. With a wired mouse and keyboard, this leaves just four other ports for peripherals. To make matters worse, they are all USB 2.0 meaning the system lacks any high speed peripheral ports suitable for high speed external storage devices. It would have been nice to see it include USB 3.0 or eSATA. Thankfully, there is plenty of internal space within the case for extra hard drives.

Since Cyberpower places an emphasis on gaming for their computer systems, the Gamer Xtreme 1318 offers one of the better graphics cards in this price range. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 card offers a solid 3D gaming experience that can easily handle up to the 1920x1080 resolution with some filter effects. If that isn't enough for you, the system comes equipped with a 700 watt power supply that can handle all of the current graphics cards on the market except maybe the very demanding dual graphics processor cards from ATI and NVIDIA. Mutliple graphics cards are not an option though as the motherboard only features a single PCI-Express graphics card slot due to its mATX format.