Specifications
FIRST LOOKS HARDWARE
CYBERPOWER GAMER ULTRA 8500 SE
Gaming Rig with Room to Grow
As a budding gamer, you needn’t shell out fi ve grand
for a system with all the bells and whistles. You
don’t even have to get a mainstream desktop and
slap a gaming card into it. Instead, you could get
the sub-$1,000 CyberPower Gamer Ultra 8500 SE
and expand it as your skill and funding increase.
The 8500 SE, with its windowed, mid-tower case
adorned with a Smilodon (saber-toothed tiger) logo
and LED lighting, looks like a gaming rig. It contains
a speedy, 3-GHz dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+
processor, 1GB of 800-MHz DDR2 memory, a 320GB
hard drive, and an nVidia GeForce 8600 GT graph-
ics card with 256MB of graphics memory. The card is
DX10-compliant and has an SLI connector.
The system can support a lot of expansion: four
more hard drives, two more memory DIMMs, two
more PCIe x1 cards, and two more PCI cards. The
case is a cinch to get into, with easy-to-open latches.
Its downside is the loud case fans. You’ll probably
want to turn the speakers up or wear headphones.
Gaming performance wasn’t bad for a system at
this price. At 1,280-by-1,024 resolution, the 8500SE
scored 46 frames per second on Prey and 48 fps on
Company of Heroes. At this resolution, it will be a
bit jerky in action situations. The 8500 SE took 1:12
(min:sec) on our Photoshop CS2 test and a respect-
able 1:23 on the Windows Media Encoder test .
The CyberPower Gamer Ultra 8500 SE is a rea-
sonably priced performance system, with a decent
feature set. It’s a good choice for a beginning gamer
or a fi lm student.—Joel Santo Domingo
Specs: 3.0-GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ processor; 1GB
800-MHz DDR2 SDRAM; 320GB, 7,200-rpm SATA hard
drive; 256MB nVidia GeForce 8600 GT graphics card;
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
Cooling fan
(loud)
CyberPower Gamer
Ultra 8500 SE
$849 direct;
$999 with 19-inch
widescreen LCD monitor
lllhm
PROS Gaming performance
on a sub-$1,000 system.
Good performance on our
multimedia benchmark tests.
Nice mix of components
for the money. Three-year
warranty.
CONS Loud cooling fans.
Ball mouse. No included
security software.
For more:
go.pcmag.com/
cyberpower8500se
Ball mouse?!
PERFORMANCE TESTS
3D TESTS GAMING TESTS (fps)
High scores are best.
Bold type denotes fi rst place.
3DMARK06 PREY COMPANY OF HEROES
RESOLUTION 1,280 x 1,024 2,560 x 1,600 1,280 x 1,024 2,560 x 1,600 1,280 x 1,024 2,560 x 1,600
AA/AF** Default 0X/8X Default High 0X/0X 0X/0X
CyberPower Gamer Ultra 8500 SE
4,428 1,774 46 16 48 4
Velocity Micro Vector GX
Campus Edition (2007) *
5,112 2,331 51 18 55 11
* Editors' Choice, reported for comparison. ** Anti-aliasing/anisotropic fi ltering.
48 PC MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 6, 2007