CyberPower Gamer Xtreme 8500: How Far Can SLI 450's Go?

The CyberPower 8500 Experience

When handling reviews of notebook systems, we usually walk you around the unit first. Those machines are very different from desktop PCs, where build quality and design play a much larger role. A desktop tower is going to be isolated from the screen, mouse, keyboard, and speakers, and when dealing with boutique builders we're generally talking about machines that are made from off-the-shelf parts. These builds are then lovingly assembled, tweaked, and tuned, then sent to you. Sometimes with a t-shirt and notebook case, as with the Xtreme 8500.

Aesthetics don't play quite as large a role with a desktop unit, particularly when buyers can choose from among 10 or more cases: what we're looking for is a balanced configuration with a low noise profile. When I say balanced, I mean that there don't appear to be corners cut, and that the processor and graphics subsystems are appropriately matched. If this were from one of the big OEMs like Dell or Acer, then the unique case might be an issue, but boutique builders generally let you choose your case.

That said, build quality is still an issue, and in that respect the 8500 is a bit unusual. The insides of the unit are clean and well-assembled, and the ASUS P7P55D-E Pro board was a fantastic choice. The tradeoff for the P55 chipset was getting an unlocked multiplier on an affordable processor while losing eight lanes of connectivity off of each graphics card slot, but there was another tradeoff made. A reasonably priced board from ASUS or Gigabyte on the X58 chipset actually results in the two PCIe x16 slots being in close proximity, exacerbating the heat issues that stem from a multi-GPU setup. The P7P55D-E Pro doesn't have this issue: the PCIe x16 slots are two slots apart instead of one, drastically improving airflow between the two cards.

Of course, that i7-875K processor is also a huge boon to the 8500. A 3.85GHz i7 is nothing to sneeze at, and it made its presence known on our CPU benchmarks. The balanced approach—raising both the BClk and multiplier—is a good one, but just like iBuyPower, CyberPower left efficiency on the table. All of the voltages are set to "Auto" in the BIOS, and motherboards left to their own devices tend to pump the hardware full of more voltage than it may actually need. Worse, just like iBuyPower, CyberPower opts to set the voltage to "Manual" instead of "Offset," which would have allowed the chip to produce much better power consumption and temperature characteristics when idle. SpeedStep was left disabled, too.

The GPU configuration is interesting, and it makes sense in practice. If you want the performance of a single Radeon HD 5870 or GeForce GTX 470, you can generally get it from a pair of GTS 450s for less than the cost of either. The 450s don't generate much noise under load either; the 8500 was fairly quiet during testing, and noise levels didn't increase appreciably from idle. With the recent price drop on the GTX 460, though, we're liable to draw the same conclusion here that we drew for the iBuyPower Paladin XLC: a pair of 460s in SLI is going to be the right call to maximize performance for your gaming dollar while keeping heat and noise down.

But I did say the 8500's build is unusual, didn't I? Here's a situation where all of the insides are solid, name-brand components (the 750-watt Corsair power supply deserves special mention), but the case is a bizarre choice. The XION Predator case used is an odd bird: it's an inexpensive case that has hot-swap hard drive bays on the front and space for the watercooling rig in the top, but it's also a bit chintzy and feels cheap. It's somewhat smaller than the behemoths we're used to seeing for big gaming systems, and the four 5.25" drive bays are already used the moment you take it out of the box. There's no external 3.5" bay for the media card reader, so it takes up an entire bay by itself. The touch-sensitive fan controls take up two. You're left with just one optical drive bay, and while that's fine for most people, anyone who's used a system with two optical drives can tell you there's a lot of convenience to be had.

And what about that fan controller? The Aerocool Touch 2000 is frankly strange to use. It does its job and does it well, but it's a little confusing and not terribly user-friendly. The screen is bright and flashy, too. This is a situation where a more mundane approach—or at least a single-bay touch-based controller—might have been more prudent. And naturally, if you go with CyberPower or another system vendor, you can tweak the configuration as you see fit.