After years of reading articles, I've finally signed up for an account just to say that this looks like a system whose good potential was wasted by some poor component selection and poor configuration.
That's the sort of thing I'd expect of a massive OEM like Dell, not a boutique system maker.
Dell has WAY better validation and QC than the likes of CyberPowerPC and iBuyPower. I've consistently seen horrendous and confusingly bad builds from the latter, ranging from physically damaged ports and slots on brand new motherboarda to fans installed in the wrong orientation.
Seriously, you'd be way better off buying from Dell if you're concerned with build quality.
IMHO - you've never dealt with dell's build issues and their so-called customer service.
My son spent nearly a grand on a 15" XPS notebook w/ processor / RAM / video card and sound card upgrades (from base model) in June of 2012. After just a month or so he has having problems with the power switch. Found this was a common problem with the 15" XPS. They had him ship the computer back to Texas and when he got the repaired computer back (fixed with an updated Motherboard) neither the video card drivers nor the sound card drivers had been re-installed. (The problem was with the motherboard, but dell always re-images your HDD to factory default... causing the customer to waste time re-installing software and restoring files once they get the computer back.)
Once he got the computer back he was on the phone with tech support for a couple of hours before both the sound card and video card worked correctly. Something was preventing the sound card from being "seen" even after the drivers were installed... don't remember the details.
Then just a month or so later he had a game stop working because the DVD drive would not recognize the disk. He first got a replacement disk from the game maker, but that didn't help. At their suggestion, we tried the game on an external USB DVD drive and it worked fine. So the disc was not the problem. This time around dell sent a tech to the house, replaced the drive, still no go with the game and blamed it on some copy protection or something. (The drive acted like it there was no disc in the drive.) It took WEEKS for that problem to be resolved. The resolution finally came when a tech had him roll back to an older driver for the drive. It turned out that the DVD drive was never the problem, just dell's crappy auto updated drivers.
Needless to say, we'll have to think long and hard about our options before considering getting anything from dell again.
So a technician at a Dell depot completed a generic restore instead of using Dell's recovery partition and did a sloppy driver install (installing some drivers out of order can cause detection issues) and then you had a DVD configuration issue (there is no "DVD" driver, it would have been a SATA controller or upper/lower registry filter problem)
Have you ever purchased a new desktop only to discover that two internal USB headers on the motherboard were physically smashed, causing an overcurrent problem that prevented the computer from POSTing? What about a dent on the PCB of the mobo next to the PCIe slot that clearly came from the bottom of the graphics card? Or a fan installed in the incorrect orientation on a CLC, and upon correcting that issue discover severe denting to the fins of the rad?
All of the above were issues I personally witnessed with ONE iBuyPower system. And it wasn't a low-end system either; ROG mobo with a GTX 680. They clearly never tested it once after assembly. But CyberPowerPC isn't any better. I've seen a SATA connector snapped off of the motherboard. I've seen a 3.5" hard drive resting in a 5.25" bay... just sitting there bouncing around inside the bay kept in place only due to the SATA cables being tied down. That one didn't even have the slightest excuse if the assembler had been short of screws or something as the chassis in question had a toolless internal hotswapable 3.5" bay with backplane.
These are INEXCUSABLE issues that I have seen far too many of in my encounters with CyberPower and iBuyPower and that I have NEVER once seen with Dell or HP or any other mainstream brand. Hardware and software can fail, problems can occur and no technician is perfect, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about utter negligence. These kinds of things should never pass any kind of post-assembly inspection which leads me to believe such an inspection doesn't happen or they just have insanely low standards.
Actually Dell is not a stranger to this sort of thing. I bought a Dell XPS L521x notebook (@1699.99) last summer and had big issues with build quality, pieces not fitting together, dead pixels, etc. It also had horrible issues with thermal throttling.
It was basically impossible to run the GPU at all because either the GPU or CPU throttled up and down to minimum clocks when playing any game, even ones that aren't particularly stressful like Sonic Generations. This resulted in wildy fluctuating framerates that made it impossible to do anything that utilized the Nvidia GPU at all.
After several system replacements and long after the 30 day return window Dell agreed that the thermal design wasn't up to par and just refunded my money.
I looked around for a replacement unit and eventually (possibly stupidly) settled on an Alienware m14x R2, which has performed very well and I have no problems with so it's not all Dell systems that have issues.
To clarify "minimum clocks" is not the advertised clock speed, but the emergency downclock frequency, which I believe was 1.2Ghz for the CPU and 200Mhz for the GPU. a 1.2Ghz i7 with a 200Mhz Geforce 640m is not much fun.
I definitely prefer to build my own, but I've dealt with CyberpowerPC in the past. They build a good PC. I had no issues with their machines. A three-year warranty included is pretty darn good in this day and age of the one-year warranty (but other OEMs will gladly sell you more for a few hundred bucks!).
I've dealt with Dell in the past more than once. In each instance, the PC would not boot when I received it and I had to fix something to get it working either with loose hardware or in the BIOS configuration. It's like they don't even boot the PC before they ship it out. Not good when you fork out your hard-earned dollars for a PC.
If I were looking for someone to build me a PC (might never happen in my lifetime, but if I were), I wouldn't hesitate to pick my own parts from the CyberpowerPC.com site and have them build it.
While I might have agreed with your assessment of CyberPower in the past, this build totally throws them in the "will not buy from this company" bin. Using cheap parts is not a good solution; even if you are building a budget PC, which of courser this is not. proper selection and system balance can keep the price low and quality high.
As far as Dell - anyone can make a bad single product, or even a line of products that turn out to be "lemons". I seriously doubt their lack of quality stands out in the crowd of mainstream PC manufacturers. I've read service horror stories about all of them. You want quality, build your own, and do it right.
AIO water coolers have become a fashion accessory. In most cases a high end air cooler will do the job just as well for less money. Now if they had built a machine which water cooled both CPU and GPU I could answer the price and the choice of case
While I agree with the other comments about the component selection not fitting the price bracket (these parts would be aiming closer to a $1400 build) I will stand by their choice to use manual voltage in the OC. I'm going through the 4770k OC circuit right now and I have a successful delid under my belt. What I'm finding is that while using offset or adaptive voltage you'll see massive Vccin spikes under AVX workloads. Massive as in I'm putting in 1.325v and 1.475 is coming out. Yowzers. But wait! No one uses AVX. Well, they do. Especially if you play emulators. Using a few more watts (I say a few because an idle 4770k even at 1.3V runs on 10-20W) is well worth it compared to the prospect of shipping an unstable OC.
AVX is probably the reason why they limited the overclock to 4.2 GHz. A factory-overclocked system needs to be able to handle anything they throw at it, no exceptions, at room temperatures that might be higher than optimal. An unstable factory OC would add massively to their costs and damage their reputation. It's better to give up ~200 MHz.
The screen shot in the review shows 81C, but it doesn't state what kind of stress tests were run. The new killer test is Linpack 11 with AVX2, which can easily push even a moderately overclocked CPU into the mid 90's range and requires significantly higher voltages than Aida64 or IBT. Even the FPU-only test in Aida64 can push some really high temps at anything above 1.15 - 1.20V.
Finally, like willis936 sais, using dynamic voltages will cause unpredictable behavior. Finding an adaptive voltage that works for a particular CPU is a long and frustrating process. In some cases it may be impossible to achieve an offset that gives you a high-enough voltage with non-AVX loads while simultaneously keeping the "AVX-boosted" voltage within reason.
Just do yourself a favor. STAY AWAY from this company. Yes they look good. But when it breaks and it WILL. All they do is give you the run around. They have had my system for over 2 months trying to fix the garbage they sell. Worse company out there for support. DONT BUY
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todlerix - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
Nothing beats a $2300+ system when it is rocking a Realtek integrated NIC.XZerg - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
or the 64gb ssd...XZerg - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
or the 1tb drive.homer_pickett - Thursday, October 9, 2014 - link
It's okay.. but when you add price into the picture it stand zero chance to for example CybertronPC Borg-Q GM4213C. /Homer from http://www.consumertop.com/best-desktop-guide/Seminya - Friday, August 23, 2013 - link
hyyyyBlackObs - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
After years of reading articles, I've finally signed up for an account just to say that this looks like a system whose good potential was wasted by some poor component selection and poor configuration.That's the sort of thing I'd expect of a massive OEM like Dell, not a boutique system maker.
Minion4Hire - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
Dell has WAY better validation and QC than the likes of CyberPowerPC and iBuyPower. I've consistently seen horrendous and confusingly bad builds from the latter, ranging from physically damaged ports and slots on brand new motherboarda to fans installed in the wrong orientation.Seriously, you'd be way better off buying from Dell if you're concerned with build quality.
typicalGeek - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
IMHO - you've never dealt with dell's build issues and their so-called customer service.My son spent nearly a grand on a 15" XPS notebook w/ processor / RAM / video card and sound card upgrades (from base model) in June of 2012. After just a month or so he has having problems with the power switch. Found this was a common problem with the 15" XPS. They had him ship the computer back to Texas and when he got the repaired computer back (fixed with an updated Motherboard) neither the video card drivers nor the sound card drivers had been re-installed. (The problem was with the motherboard, but dell always re-images your HDD to factory default... causing the customer to waste time re-installing software and restoring files once they get the computer back.)
Once he got the computer back he was on the phone with tech support for a couple of hours before both the sound card and video card worked correctly. Something was preventing the sound card from being "seen" even after the drivers were installed... don't remember the details.
Then just a month or so later he had a game stop working because the DVD drive would not recognize the disk. He first got a replacement disk from the game maker, but that didn't help. At their suggestion, we tried the game on an external USB DVD drive and it worked fine. So the disc was not the problem. This time around dell sent a tech to the house, replaced the drive, still no go with the game and blamed it on some copy protection or something. (The drive acted like it there was no disc in the drive.) It took WEEKS for that problem to be resolved. The resolution finally came when a tech had him roll back to an older driver for the drive. It turned out that the DVD drive was never the problem, just dell's crappy auto updated drivers.
Needless to say, we'll have to think long and hard about our options before considering getting anything from dell again.
Minion4Hire - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
So a technician at a Dell depot completed a generic restore instead of using Dell's recovery partition and did a sloppy driver install (installing some drivers out of order can cause detection issues) and then you had a DVD configuration issue (there is no "DVD" driver, it would have been a SATA controller or upper/lower registry filter problem)Have you ever purchased a new desktop only to discover that two internal USB headers on the motherboard were physically smashed, causing an overcurrent problem that prevented the computer from POSTing? What about a dent on the PCB of the mobo next to the PCIe slot that clearly came from the bottom of the graphics card? Or a fan installed in the incorrect orientation on a CLC, and upon correcting that issue discover severe denting to the fins of the rad?
All of the above were issues I personally witnessed with ONE iBuyPower system. And it wasn't a low-end system either; ROG mobo with a GTX 680. They clearly never tested it once after assembly. But CyberPowerPC isn't any better. I've seen a SATA connector snapped off of the motherboard. I've seen a 3.5" hard drive resting in a 5.25" bay... just sitting there bouncing around inside the bay kept in place only due to the SATA cables being tied down. That one didn't even have the slightest excuse if the assembler had been short of screws or something as the chassis in question had a toolless internal hotswapable 3.5" bay with backplane.
These are INEXCUSABLE issues that I have seen far too many of in my encounters with CyberPower and iBuyPower and that I have NEVER once seen with Dell or HP or any other mainstream brand. Hardware and software can fail, problems can occur and no technician is perfect, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about utter negligence. These kinds of things should never pass any kind of post-assembly inspection which leads me to believe such an inspection doesn't happen or they just have insanely low standards.
Flunk - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
Actually Dell is not a stranger to this sort of thing. I bought a Dell XPS L521x notebook (@1699.99) last summer and had big issues with build quality, pieces not fitting together, dead pixels, etc. It also had horrible issues with thermal throttling.It was basically impossible to run the GPU at all because either the GPU or CPU throttled up and down to minimum clocks when playing any game, even ones that aren't particularly stressful like Sonic Generations. This resulted in wildy fluctuating framerates that made it impossible to do anything that utilized the Nvidia GPU at all.
After several system replacements and long after the 30 day return window Dell agreed that the thermal design wasn't up to par and just refunded my money.
I looked around for a replacement unit and eventually (possibly stupidly) settled on an Alienware m14x R2, which has performed very well and I have no problems with so it's not all Dell systems that have issues.
Flunk - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
To clarify "minimum clocks" is not the advertised clock speed, but the emergency downclock frequency, which I believe was 1.2Ghz for the CPU and 200Mhz for the GPU. a 1.2Ghz i7 with a 200Mhz Geforce 640m is not much fun.Ubercake - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
I definitely prefer to build my own, but I've dealt with CyberpowerPC in the past. They build a good PC. I had no issues with their machines. A three-year warranty included is pretty darn good in this day and age of the one-year warranty (but other OEMs will gladly sell you more for a few hundred bucks!).I've dealt with Dell in the past more than once. In each instance, the PC would not boot when I received it and I had to fix something to get it working either with loose hardware or in the BIOS configuration. It's like they don't even boot the PC before they ship it out. Not good when you fork out your hard-earned dollars for a PC.
If I were looking for someone to build me a PC (might never happen in my lifetime, but if I were), I wouldn't hesitate to pick my own parts from the CyberpowerPC.com site and have them build it.
I would never buy a Dell again.
Sabresiberian - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
While I might have agreed with your assessment of CyberPower in the past, this build totally throws them in the "will not buy from this company" bin. Using cheap parts is not a good solution; even if you are building a budget PC, which of courser this is not. proper selection and system balance can keep the price low and quality high.As far as Dell - anyone can make a bad single product, or even a line of products that turn out to be "lemons". I seriously doubt their lack of quality stands out in the crowd of mainstream PC manufacturers. I've read service horror stories about all of them. You want quality, build your own, and do it right.
cjs150 - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
Poor value for the price.AIO water coolers have become a fashion accessory. In most cases a high end air cooler will do the job just as well for less money. Now if they had built a machine which water cooled both CPU and GPU I could answer the price and the choice of case
spigzone - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
These prebuilt boutique computer reviews never made sense to me.So you go online and order up your choice of a case, cpu, gpu, memory, hdd, ssd and power supply - which continually change and evolve over time.
Seems like a meaningless waste of time and manpower better spent on meaningful component reviews.
willis936 - Thursday, August 22, 2013 - link
While I agree with the other comments about the component selection not fitting the price bracket (these parts would be aiming closer to a $1400 build) I will stand by their choice to use manual voltage in the OC. I'm going through the 4770k OC circuit right now and I have a successful delid under my belt. What I'm finding is that while using offset or adaptive voltage you'll see massive Vccin spikes under AVX workloads. Massive as in I'm putting in 1.325v and 1.475 is coming out. Yowzers. But wait! No one uses AVX. Well, they do. Especially if you play emulators. Using a few more watts (I say a few because an idle 4770k even at 1.3V runs on 10-20W) is well worth it compared to the prospect of shipping an unstable OC.JimmiG - Friday, August 23, 2013 - link
AVX is probably the reason why they limited the overclock to 4.2 GHz. A factory-overclocked system needs to be able to handle anything they throw at it, no exceptions, at room temperatures that might be higher than optimal. An unstable factory OC would add massively to their costs and damage their reputation. It's better to give up ~200 MHz.The screen shot in the review shows 81C, but it doesn't state what kind of stress tests were run. The new killer test is Linpack 11 with AVX2, which can easily push even a moderately overclocked CPU into the mid 90's range and requires significantly higher voltages than Aida64 or IBT. Even the FPU-only test in Aida64 can push some really high temps at anything above 1.15 - 1.20V.
Finally, like willis936 sais, using dynamic voltages will cause unpredictable behavior. Finding an adaptive voltage that works for a particular CPU is a long and frustrating process. In some cases it may be impossible to achieve an offset that gives you a high-enough voltage with non-AVX loads while simultaneously keeping the "AVX-boosted" voltage within reason.
Drittz121 - Friday, February 28, 2014 - link
Just do yourself a favor. STAY AWAY from this company. Yes they look good. But when it breaks and it WILL. All they do is give you the run around. They have had my system for over 2 months trying to fix the garbage they sell. Worse company out there for support. DONT BUY