CyberPower PC Black Pearl Review
Playing PC video games requires more than just the cheapest bargain computer with wimpy hardware components. Those kinds of gaming PCs may have attention-capturing specs like
Video/Audio:
A few months ago NVIDIA dropped a couple of bomb shells on us, the GTX 480 and 470. However, do to some minor issues the 480 was updated and sent out with a new name the GTX 580 which is by far their best card. This card is one of the most powerful on the market, giving the owner of one a nice smooth ride in any game they play. CyberPower's Black Pearl gaming PC comes equipped with two of these amazing cards, which is more than enough graphic processing power to run any game at max graphic settings and maintain a high rate of frames per second.
Each card has 1.5GB of GDDR5 video memory, which is more than enough for any game and is only dwarfed by AMD's flagship, the ATI Radeon HD 5970, which has 2GB. The 1.5GB of memory are clocked at 1848 MHz and a core speed of 772 MHz, which is the fastest on the marketAside from excellent performance, the other great part about the GTX 400 series cards is their inclusion of DirectX 11 which is the newest multimedia and gaming interfaced used to make those games even more realistic. For a while ATI cards were the only contenders in that market but that is no longer the case. DX 11 focused on adding more computing support, as well as the video rendering feature tessellation. These were to really give game developers, and eventually gamers, more realistic and fluid graphics rendering.
Tessellation has been around for a while but has never been implemented much due to the processing power it takes. Since the DX 11 release, though, that is probably about to change. NVIDIA took those same things and integrated them into the FERMI technology that the GTX 400 series has. With this added technology and support we are ready for some seriously intense graphics that will astound us all.
Processor:
Quad-core processors dominate most of the high-end gaming PC market. However, both Intel and AMD have taken the next step and brought out a six-core, 12-thread chip. The CyberPower PC Black Pearl has the Intel Core i7 980 Extreme, which is by far the most powerful CPU on the market. This processor stock is clocked at 3.3 GHz but it comes overclocked to 4 GHz. Normally you would have to worry about heat, but this gaming PC comes with the Asetek 510LC 120mm Liquid Cooling system, which will keep everything at a reasonable temperature.
Memory/Storage:
Another very important feature that every gaming PC needs is a good set of RAM. The CyberPower PC Black Pearl has 6GB of Kingston's HyperX DDR3, which is clocked at 1600 MHz. The motherboard allows for adding another three sticks if you wish and can handle faster clock speeds as well. That is plenty of RAM power and probably isn't the bottleneck on this rig. If there is a bottleneck it probably resides with the hard drive, which is a regular 7200 1TB HDD. Thankfully that is the secondary drive. The primary is an Intel 80GB SSD. As long as you are using it and not the secondary, slow speeds are not probable.
Additional Features:
The motherboard housing all these jaw-dropping pieces of technology is the ASUS P6X58D-E Intel X58, which should handle just about anything you can throw at it. The CyberPower PC Black Pearl has two PCI Express x16 slots, both running at x16. There are another two x16 slots running at x8 and then two xl slots. There is also a PCI slot for anyone still using equipment that requires one. With about every SATA connection you can think of you should have no problems with storage interface options. Also there is FireWire and up to 10 USB ports at your disposal.
This gaming PC is running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit like most other pre-built machines. There are two optical drives, a Blu-ray drive and a DVD +/- RW drive. Now between the processor, RAM, graphics cards, optical drives, water cooling and everything else you can imagine how much power this gaming PC must need. Thankfully there is a Corsair 1000-watt power supply to do the job, and it does it well. A power supply with this much wattage should have no problem keeping up to speed with advancing technology.Support/Warranty:
CyberPower PC offers full information about what is in each of their gaming PCs but like most other companies doesn't go into much detail about the specs of each piece of hardware. This is common and isn't really a problem since most people know what they're looking for when they buy a gaming PC. Although they don't offer those details, they can still easily be found elsewhere.
According to the code of Power PC's warranty, you are covered by a limited three-year labor and one-year parts warranty. Although it's only a guideline and not an actual rule, if any parts are defective, they will show their true colors before that one year mark usually. Three years of labor is nice should you need any servicing. After three years most gamers are looking to upgrade. On the gaming PC website you can find a contact phone number, email address, FAQs, driver downloads and just about anything else you could want for additional help and support.Summary:
As you can see, the CyberPower PC Black Pearl gaming PC is by no means the "$300 super savings special." Gaming PCs need high-end hardware and unmatched computing speeds and this system gives you all the computing power you could ever want in a gaming computer. With it you can set sail on the vast ocean of great games, then pillage and plunder to your heart's desire. With all the great games coming out and DirectX 11 implementation creeping into the works, all gamers can use a powerhouse like this computer to help them in their epic gaming adventures.
