Cyberpower ULTRA 9 GAMING PC Review
|Cyberpower’s ULTRA 9 GAMING PC is a decked out, high end monster of a gaming PC. You’ll be spending just under £3000 for this beast. You do get a fair bit for your money though, here’s the spec:
- AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
- 16GB 3200MHz DDR4
- AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT 16GB
- MSI X570-A Pro RGB
- 500GB Seagate Firecuda 520 M.2 PCIe SSD
- 2TB Seagate BarraCuda SATA3 HDD
- Cooler Master AIO
- Lian Li Lancool II Mesh Black
- Windows 10 Home
The base price (including VAT) is £2779, although as will many Cyberpower systems, you can configure it to how you’d like. You’ll probably want to add a little more RAM, as 16GB in this sort of system is a little lacking, and perhaps a bigger M.2 SSD as well.
The star of the show is the insane RX 6900 XT, a card that can power through games even at 4K with 144Hz displays. It can do ray tracing, although it’s more a match for RTX 2000 series cards there, than the newer RTX 3000 series cards. While playing Cyberpunk 2077 with a pretty early patch, and at ultra settings, it was happily sitting at over 80FPS in the built up downtown areas, and more like 90-100FPS in the more remote areas – at 1440p! That level of power means no matter what game, what setting level, or resolution, this card can handle it.
In COD Modern Warfare, again at 1440p and maxed out settings bar ray tracing, it sat at well over 220FPS, with peaks of 250+. It didn’t drop below 200FPS once, so running at 4K 144Hz should do just fine or if you’d rather hook up the newer 240Hz 1440p panels that’ll work well too.
Finally, in an AMD title like Dirt 5, even on it’s highest setting of ‘Ultra high’, it’ll still average over 100FPS at 1440p even without Fidelity CAS enabled. Like I said, no matter the game or resolution, you’ll have a good time with this.
As for the CPU, I’ve already tested AMD’s Ryzen 5900X in a number of ways, including streaming using the X264 encoder, and it’s raw performance compared to the now last gen 3900X, but it’s safe to say it’s an incredibly impressive chip. Gaming performance, even at 1080p, it up significantly from 3rd gen Ryzen. Productivity performance is up too, despite still being a 12 core, 24 thread chip. It is the swan song for the AM4 platform though, so keep in mind in a few years when you look to upgrade, there won’t be a drop in CPU option (except the 16 core 5950X) that’ll give you more performance unless you upgrade your motherboard and by then RAM too.
Cyberpower chose a Cooler Master 240mm AIO to cool it, which is a decent choice. It’s relatively quiet since the 5900X only draws around 130W of power total – nothing compared to Intel’s 10900K which can draw well over 200W, even closer to 300W with a mild overclock. Temps were kept in the low 60-70°c range, and noise was relatively low as well.
Build quality on the system was good – the cable management was done well, RGB installation of which there was a lot was good, and ‘Gamers Nexus Approved’ AIO mounting too. Parts choice was fine, although the low memory and primary storage drive capacity for the price tag does leave some things to be desired. The motherboard isn’t the most impressive either, although thanks to the Ryzen CPUs drawing so little power, it really doesn’t matter all that much.
Overall, the Ultra 9 Gaming PC from Cyberpower deserves a Gold Award. It’s well built, reasonably spec’d, and delivers phenomenal performance albeit at a relatively high cost.