To buy from Cyberpower or to build own PC from scratch?

Has anyone ever bought a system from cyberpower? If so, did you guys
have a good or bad experience with them.

Otherwise here is the system Im considering buying from them.

$669.00- Is the price reasonable or can I make one cheaper?
(before all applicable rebates)


CASE: HOT NEW! X-Discovery Mid-Tower Case 420W W/ WINDOW & LCD Temperature Display (Black Color)
CPU: (Socket AM2) AMD Athlon™64 X2 3800+ Dual-Core CPU w/ HyperTransport Technology-Is this good enough for now.
I might game here and there on the system but its not a priority.

MOTHERBOARD: (Socket AM2)GigaByte GA-M55SLI-S4 nForce4 SLI Chipset DDR2/800 SATA 16x PCI-Express MBoard w/GbLAN, IEEE1394, USB2.0, &7.1Audio- Is it expandable enough for future upgrades


MEMORY: (Req.DDR2 MainBoard)1GB (2x512MB) PC6400 DDR2/800 Dual Channel Memory (Corsair Value Select or Major Brand)
VIDEO CARD: NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT 256MB 16X PCI EXPRESS (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)- Decent card?

VIDEO CARD 2: NONE
LCD Monitor: NONE
HARD DRIVE: Single Hard Drive (250GB SATA-II 3.0Gb/s 8MB Cache 7200RPM HDD)
Data Hard Drive: NONE
Optical Drive: (Special Price) 18X DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW DRIVE DUAL LAYER (BLACK COLOR)
Optical Drive 2: 16X DVD ROM (BLACK COLOR)
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO

Is this a reasonable setup for the price and may I expand upon this system
when my funds expand?

Is there changes anyone would make to this system?

I might want to game somewhat in the future but again its not a priority right nw. I just want a new rig since my Alienware went kaput after 5 years in use.

Any suggestions would be appreciated

If you want to game, go with atleast a 7600GT. The 7300 is a terrible card, and the 7600GT will play just about anything currently out on atleast medium settings. (With the exception of a few like Rainbow 6: Vegas, which will require low settings.) You can pick up an eVGA 7600GT on Newegg for around $90 after rebate, as opposed to $210 on Cyberpower.

As for the X2 3800+, it is a great card and as long as you have sufficient cooling, you can OC it easily. Mine is running 2.4ghz on stock volts with no problems.


I would reccomend building, as you can get better prices on Newegg as well as warrenties for each part.

I had such a bad experience with Cyberpower. I ended up returning and just eat the shipping cost myself. Ended up getting a XPS and counldnt be happier. Also I would just get a Core 2 Duo instead.

The breakdown for buying or building a PC basically goes like this:

low-end - buy retail/off the shelf.

mid-range - you'll break even building it yourself, so you can go either way...retail or build it.

high-end - build it yourself to save a good deal.

You need to ask yourself what you'll be using the PC for. Since you said you won't be gaming much, it probably makes sense to buy it retail. However, I've heard some stuff about people getting screwed with cyberpower/ibuypower, so use some caution.

I second the opinion that the 7300 card is very weak for gaming. However, since you'll have a PCI-e slot, you can easily replace it with something a little beefier...the 7600GT, maybe.

[quote name='62t']I had such a bad experience with Cyberpower. I ended up returning and just eat the shipping cost myself. Ended up getting a XPS and counldnt be happier. Also I would just get a Core 2 Duo instead.[/QUOTE]

Ditto on that. They are easily one of the shittiest computer manufacturers out there. Interestingly, I remember hearing that they were having their CS people write good reviews for them at resellerratings.com which is why the score is much higher now than it was.

I'd be lying to myself if I didn't want it for gaming. There is games out there for the pc that tickle the gamer inside of me and future ones that look effin amazing(ie Crysis). I don't have the cash to build high end right now, but I want to build something for future expansion when I can pony up the cash for a faster processor, better video card and more memory. I just need a pc to do my everyday task for now.

I know retail pc's are usually built with meh parts and the expandability of
those system are probably limited. I was going to with Dell since they have a 25 percent off coupon off $999 but heard that they use propriatery motherboards and to me that sounds like expansion hell.

My only option looks to be do it yourself so Im going to go with newegg.

Any recommendations on MOBOs? Im going with INTEL duo core processors.
Probably a E6400 or 6600.

Yeah, you can build a good gaming PC for like... 800 or so... though upping that to 1000 will definitely be beneficial. For the motherboard, I like DFI, though I admit that it's probably not the best thing to buy if you're new to building computers... so I'd probably consider Asus' mobos.

And for the video card, I'd seriously consider the 8800GTS. It's a huge leap above cards from the previous gen. and it supports all that fancy DX10 stuff that Crysis will use.

always build yourself, this way you exactly manufactuerer and quality of parts you are buying. If you want to game on the PC there is no option, Every machine I have seen and used by a dell/ gateway type company skimps somwhere if not cheap mobos with seemingly slow IDE/Sata buses or picky memory controllers.

When I build machines especially a gameing rig for myself, alot of people are always so surprised when my machine seems to play better than their lastest XPS dell or whatever and I spend alot less. And I never buy teh most top of the line, after all I am still running a 256meg 6800 geforce card.

Remember Gameing Video card most important, and second is harddrive speed, I hate being on someones brand new top of line PRocessor powered machine and cann't do alot of things at once because of harddrive thrashing, I have 5 seperate harddrives just to fight this myself, I like have up to 8 unraring going on and par rescues session running at once and still surf the web.

Building a computer for yourself is way better than buying a pre-built one.

1. You can usually find great deals on cases, PSes, HD (oh man, are there deals on HDs), and monitors.

2. You get the full warranty. Most computer products come with multi-year warranties. If you buy pre-built, you get 1 year even if they use the OEM parts.

3. If anything goes wrong, you can fix it yourself much faster since you know how you did everything.

[quote name='Vinny']Building a computer for yourself is way better than buying a pre-built one.

1. You can usually find great deals on cases, PSes, HD (oh man, are there deals on HDs), and monitors.

2. You get the full warranty. Most computer products come with multi-year warranties. If you buy pre-built, you get 1 year even if they use the OEM parts.

3. If anything goes wrong, you can fix it yourself much faster since you know how you did everything.[/quote]

Any site you recommend buying parts from? Im focusing on newegg as my source of parts but any others that need to be mentioned or that have better prices on certain parts?

If they're anything like ibuypower.com, they are complete shit, and run by the biggest asshats on the planet.

Build yourself! It's not hard if you research it, and it's a great learning experience. If you do that, order all your stuff from Newegg.com or TigerDirect.com. Great prices, and I've never had a problem on any of my many, many orders.

If you are afraid of a self builld, look into any local pc places. many are pretty good, and have good prices as well

Newegg for anything pricy, TigerDirect for the little nuts and bolts and not-as-important stuff.

RECOMMENDATIONS: Go with an Intel Dual-Core chip....skip the AMD's at this point, the Intel Dual Cores are far better for gaming and have shifted alot of people away from AMD, which reigned supreme for the past few years.

Dont get too fancy with your case and crap like that...if I may recommend, buy Aluminum...its light and easy to move around....dont waste your time with lights and plastic fascias with lots of doors and crap like that...save your money for performance, not cold cathode lighting.

I'd recommend a case that used 120mm fans intead of lots of 80mm ones to save on noise.

Dont bother with RAID...get a single SATA drive, or two SATA drives if you want...but dont waste your time with RAID 0, its not much faster than a modern SATA drive and you're now twice as likely to lose everything if one of the drives dies.

Videocards...two choices: Low end (under $200) Radeon X1950 PRo...higher end ($350) Nvidia 8800GTS 320meg....

Dont skimp on the power supply either......spend $100 bucks and get a really good one. One cheap power supply can take all your components with it if it dies a horrible death.

Good Luck

[quote name='Ockto']Any site you recommend buying parts from? Im focusing on newegg as my source of parts but any others that need to be mentioned or that have better prices on certain parts?[/QUOTE]

Newegg for pretty much everything. Coolerguys.com for all the smaller stuff (wires, screws, fans, etc.). Check outpost.com for cases or power supplies, they usually have some good stuff for really cheap after rebates.

Go check out the Fatwallet forums for deals on cases and HDs. Right now, you can get a 500GB HD for $125.

I also recommend going with an Intel Core 2 Duo. You get a better processor and can use slower memory without much of a performance hit.

Also wanna add don't bother with SLI (Or if you like Radion Crossfire). I had SLI in my rig, but saw extremely little to no increase in performace, and so returned one of the GPUs and saved that money. Don't let magazines like CGW (now Games For Windows) fool you with their love of all things SLI

SLI only comes into play at high rez..and when I mean high rez I mean 1080p and up, at least with the current crop of games out there. At lower resolutions you wont see a difference.

But he wont be going SLI on his budget, and if he does, that expensive Power Supply needs to be able to handle the load

One word on the HD: Windows is *generally* faster when you install just the OS on a smaller seperate drive, while leaving the page file and all your installs on a seperate disk. The idea is to have a small, clean OS drive and all your data on a seperate disk. Granted, today its tough to find a small, fast, drive but thats why some folks love the lower-sized Western Digital Raptors.

Also, defragging half a terabyte can suck

This would make a good gameing rig right now, yeah it is AMD based as previously mentioned INTEL is the performance king right now but AMD is still close in numbers and still alot cheaper.

it is as always what can you afford and who do you favor Intel or AMD.

This is 624 dollars for very good core parts, you could switch out the video card if you are an ATI person, and you could get Patriot memory modules sometimes cheaper on sale, every thing from NEwegg.com so might find some parts on zipzoom or chiefvalue with free shipping or for a few dollars cheaper,

***These parts are meant for quality affordable machine, not a overclockers fantasy. This machine is close to what I run except for new parts and my "old" computer still plays any game good, even though i dont' play PC games anymore, swtich to a console junky now.

ABIT KN9 Socket AM2 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail
Item #: N82E16813127010

EVGA 256-P2-N624-AR GeForce 7900GS 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 KO Video Card - Retail
Item #: N82E16814130056

APEVIA ATX-AS680W-BL ATX12V / EPS12V 680W Power Supply - Retail
Item #: N82E16817148022

CORSAIR ValueSelect 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533 (PC2 4200) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model VS2GBKIT533D2 - Retail
Item #: N82E16820145527

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ Brisbane 1.9GHz Socket AM2 Processor Model ADO3600DDBOX - Retail
Item #: N82E16819103046

and find the Ultra aluminum full tower case, commonly sold at Radio Shack, ZipZoom and Tiger Direct for less than 100 dollars good case very roomy holds about 12 drives total, I have 6 harddrives in mine and 1 burner and still have more room than most mother boards have sata and/or ide ports combined.


However you choice was in my opinion still good, I would go less on the case paying alot for fancy lights and temparature guages and up the Video Card, also The new NEC burners are gettting a bad name due to quality once they partnered with SONY, the new pioneer are excellent, which Pioneer has only made 1 burner that was alittle more finicky over most quality burners, I have ran Pioneer burners since the days of affordable internal burners, i think was about 5 years or so ago.

How do you have 6 drives in your Aluminus? It only has 5 internal 3.5" bays...k

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UB Black /Blue Aluminum Bezel , SECC Chassis ATX Mid Tower Computer Case - Retail
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Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
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EVGA 256-P2-N615-TX GeForce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card - Retail
Item #: N82E16814130062
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Thermaltake TR2 W0070RUC ATX 430W Power Supply - Retail
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$21.99
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Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
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Suggestions: Don't skimp on RAM -- double it. Second, get a better video card.

[quote name='Vinny']How do you have 6 drives in your Aluminus? It only has 5 internal 3.5" bays...k[/quote]


http://www.ultraproducts.com/product_details.php?cPath=13&pPath=411&productID=411



5 - 5.25" Bays
5 - Internal 3.5" Hard Drive Bays with quick release and reverse mount
2 - External 3.5" Bays

and many stores carrying 3.5 to 5.25 harddrive mounting brackets like these
http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=925 or http://www.circotech.com/3-5-to-5-25-metal-hard-drive-mounting-kit.html they also used to come with harddrives back in the day so i have extra from back then, yeah I don't throw away screws, mounting plates all that extra hardware that comes with cases and harddrives etc.

next question since you are thinking how to have 6 drives on one mother board, I have an Asrock Sata2 939 pin mobo, which has 2 sata 1 connections, 1 sata 2 connection, and 2 ide connections........... so 3 sata and 3 ide harddrives (2 ide drives are slaves ) and 1 ide DVD burner.

Next Question.....

OP > double the ram and change the video card to a 7900 GS. Also, get a better power supply. You'll be in a world of shit if you don't. And don't forget to get the essentials like thermal paste and IDE cables. What's your budget? Maybe some of us could help you out. Don't push purchase till you research this.

Here's a question:
Who needs 6 drives in their system

Your pr0n collection isn't valuable enough to run Raid 5

[quote name='HeadRusch']Here's a question:
Who needs 6 drives in their system

Your pr0n collection isn't valuable enough to run Raid 5 [/quote]

ha ha ha.....Harddrive IO is the ultimate killer to performance, no matter raid 0 and no matter how fast your CPU is, when doing heavy IO, like mulitple 4.5 gig unrar sets, I refuse to waste my time doing stuff synchronously. I one time had 8 unrars and something like 4 par recoveries going and IO got sluggish but the CPU was hardly being ultilised, and yes I defrag frequestly and don't have things running in background doing IO.

Thats excessive..... I'm not a big fan of RAID 0, particularly when its barely faster than a single SATA drive these days but doubles your chances of your data going belly up if one of the stripes fails.

But, If you're doing that kind of throughput, you should definately be running 15k rpm SCSI's , not screwing around with SATA's or IDE's!

Tho I hear those Raptors are pretty quick.

[quote name='advancedgamer468']OP > double the ram and change the video card to a 7900 GS. Also, get a better power supply. You'll be in a world of shit if you don't. And don't forget to get the essentials like thermal paste and IDE cables. What's your budget? Maybe some of us could help you out. Don't push purchase till you research this.[/quote]

$1000 is my limit on my pc warchest.

[quote name='HeadRusch']Thats excessive..... I'm not a big fan of RAID 0, particularly when its barely faster than a single SATA drive these days but doubles your chances of your data going belly up if one of the stripes fails.

But, If you're doing that kind of throughput, you should definately be running 15k rpm SCSI's , not screwing around with SATA's or IDE's!

Tho I hear those Raptors are pretty quick.[/quote]

I wish I had that kind of money, I have been on Raid 0 drive arrays at work with the fiber connections and boy was it fast.

[quote name='mercilessming']http://www.ultraproducts.com/product_details.php?cPath=13&pPath=411&productID=411



5 - 5.25" Bays
5 - Internal 3.5" Hard Drive Bays with quick release and reverse mount
2 - External 3.5" Bays

and many stores carrying 3.5 to 5.25 harddrive mounting brackets like these
http://svp.co.uk/products-solo.php?pid=925 or http://www.circotech.com/3-5-to-5-25-metal-hard-drive-mounting-kit.html they also used to come with harddrives back in the day so i have extra from back then, yeah I don't throw away screws, mounting plates all that extra hardware that comes with cases and harddrives etc.

next question since you are thinking how to have 6 drives on one mother board, I have an Asrock Sata2 939 pin mobo, which has 2 sata 1 connections, 1 sata 2 connection, and 2 ide connections........... so 3 sata and 3 ide harddrives (2 ide drives are slaves ) and 1 ide DVD burner.

Next Question.....[/QUOTE]

:lol: Whoa buddy... slow down.

I have the same case as you.

I just asked how how you got 6 HDs in the case when it only has 5 bays for HDs. You could've just said you got a 3.5" to 5.25" bracket... I didn't need to know all that other info.