CyberPowerPC Warrior Gaming PC - Intel Core i7-11700F, Nvidia RTX 3070 8GB, 16GB RAM, 1TB NVMe SSD, 650W 80+ PSU, Wi-Fi, Windows 11, Amethyst RGB

Bought Hello Neighbor for my kids at Christmas on Steam so they could play it on my laptop. This is what inadvertently alerted me to the ridiculously good Steam Sales. A few months down the line and suddenly I found that I had somehow accidentally amassed a huge Steam game Library ... And just like that, consoles were ancient history. My laptop was permanently hi jacked by my kids, it's hard drive was completely filled up with games, and it was exposing itself to very high temperatures that it's fan sounded very, very angry about on a continuous basis. Even on the lowest of low game settings and with an additional USB cooling fan underneath it. So I realised I had to get a gaming PC; Firstly, to get my laptop back. And secondly, because it really is the way forward these days.So I did the usual Dad thing, started with a £700 budget before research, and then ended up scratching my head looking at £3000 PC's after research, before coming to the conclusion that as with all things, you have to find the practical balance point for your needs and affordability. With Steam, you can rest assured games will be a fraction of the cost of consoles, and with even a £700 PC, you can easily smash the power of the XBox One X, and have all the extra functionality of a PC to boot. So why buy both when one does it all better?After a lot of looking around different sites, this PC was the balance point for me.Nvidia GTX 1080 8GB, 7th Gen i7, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 2GB HD and 240GB SSD, 600W PSU, Win 10 and WiFi. Plus it comes in very handsome functional casing. This is rare.VR ready and more than enough to blitz any modern AAA game on Ultra settings and I'd strongly wager would have considerably more power than even the unreleased PS5 over the coming years, sorting my kids, and my wallet, for many years to come when it comes to gaming, freeing me from updating consoles and seeing very expensively priced games go redundant to old hardware as always seems to be the case. With an upgraded PC, there's no redundancy, your old games only ever look better than ever.If I could find fault, it's that the RAM installed was 2 x 8GB sticks rather than 1x16GB stick, meaning it will be more expensive if I need to upgrade to 32GB RAM in the future, and that the motherboard is an H110 chipset. But this isn't a fault as such if you're talking performance, it just means future upgrading will be more expensive. But that then, that reduces your current price ... so like I said, you need to find your own balance of need and affordability with gaming PC's. And this for me was the ONLY package that did just that. And I looked at a lot of sites and packages. I found only one of the same spec cheaper ... but it's casing looked like Sloth from The Goonies and was almost twice the width of conventional casing. Trust me, this CyberpowerPC is very good value for the performance you are getting. And it looks cool.Given I have to re-download my Steam library, I've only currently tested F1 2017 on the highest possible graphical settings so far. And it performs perfectly without hitch. I didn't even know there was supposed to be spray and fog from the cars in front in the wet! It adds so much. My laptop on low settings just cut all of that out completely. You can see a video comparison on You Tube of the difference if you're interested between the difference between low and ultra settings.Also worth mentioning, The PC really is whisper quite, or better still, barely a quite whisper. Even playing games on Ultra settings. My old laptop sounded and felt like it was about to explode playing on just the lowest settings. And, putting your hand by the fan outlets, where as you feel slightly warmer air coming from the PC fan, you could cook an egg by my laptops fan ...And what of CyberpowerPC as a brand? Would I recommend them?Yes.I've never come across them before, and I'd never recommend brand loyalty by default, as ironically, this is the only way to keep a brand loyal to it's consumers.But, the PC was well packaged, with lots of protective air wraps inside the PC to protect all its internal parts during transit. The documentation for all the internal hardware parts along with the windows 10 recovery disc was all included in a zip bag. Even though I didn't, an email as sent with numbers to ring if you have problems with your new PC in any way.And in the research I did, and in all the different price brackets for performance I considered, they offered good packages in all. So whatever your budget, I'd strongly recommend looking up their offerings on Amazon. Of course shop around too on lots of other sites as well to gauge the current market, you'd be mad not too, but I do strongly recommend at the very least using them as a base reference for comparison on what you can expect to get on price, performance, and looks. And that's a good balance that I associate with their brand in a marketplace with HUGE variance. This is a good thing. I hope they maintain that balance for the consumer as their brand no doubt grows. After all, that balance is the only plus that gaming consoles have over PC's.

After adding a bunch of parts to my cart to build my own machine, I thought I'd check what was available ready made. By the time I would purchase genuine Windows 10 on top of the components I'd chosen, it was more expensive than this machine. Even selecting all the parts from Amazon comes very close to the price of this machine WITHOUT Windows 10, so it's a great value and allowed me to be lazy.PROS:While cheaper options have been chosen in places, nothing off brand or mismatching has been specced.CaseI7-8700 and RTX2060Memory (2x8Gb for dual channel operation)Boots quickly despite no nvme ssdCONS:CaseWifi card has poor rangeMemoryThermalsThe machine was delivered in its case packaging (InWin 101) with no extra carton around it, though once I removed it from the box was happy to see that it was stuffed with air cushions to prevent the GPU etc flailing around. You get a bag with the manuals for the motherboard, gpu and antenna for the wifi card and a quick startup sheet.I wasn't mad about the case choice when I was shopping for this, but in person, it looks 100% nicer. The case has a tempered glass side panel which is smoked, looks so much nicer than an acrylic side panel. It's actually an attractive case BUT it has an unusual layout. PSU mounting is at the top, old school, there are 3 fan positions at the bottom (with a filter, but no fans have been supplied) 1 rear exhaust (the only fan that IS supplied) and two more positions on the right side (unfiltered). There are no traditional front intake positions, this case was clearly designed for use with water cooling in mind (a 240mm rad exhausting out the side with 3 120mm fans drawing air in from below and another 120mm exhausting at the rear). At idle, temps are fine, but firing up any games soon has temps soaring, there's just not enough airflow as the machine comes.This brings us to noise levels, the CPU has the stock Intel cooler on it, and THAT'S the noise maker here, it really gets loud trying to keep the 8700 under control and you'll rarely see full turbo clocks as a result. The GPU (Asus Phoenix single fan blower style) doesn't go above 82 and never kicks its own fan into high gear (which is loud) and instead just throttles back a little (and it gets to 1950Mhz on the core and then keeps it stable around 1800, still higher than the card's specified boost clock) and yes, you can hear the whooshing of air, but that's all you get from it, no whine like the CPU fan. Both of these temps could be lowered by sucking in some air, so I'm going to run 3 intakes on the bottom and 2 exhausts on the side to improve airflow. Performance is as you'd expect from a machine with an i7-8700 and RTX2060. VERY happy with it.The motherboard is a good match (B360) for a non K CPU, I was pleased that it had TWO sticks of 8GB on it for dual operation, the downside, is that having only 2 slots anyway, should you want to upgrade it to the 32GB max the board supports, you'll have to ditch the existing memory and slap a pair of 16s in.Cable management is another plus, not as clean as I would have made it, but definitely not thrown together in a rush. I would have personally used an nvme ssd instead of the conventional SSD, but the fact is, on a cold boot, as soon as the bios beeps, it takes 2 seconds to be at the desktop, and I keep my favorite game on the ssd and that loads near instantly too. The wifi card is seriously range limited sadly and that's the only other weak point of the system.All in all a great performer at a great price. Without increasing the price TOO much, and to perfect the system, a few more pounds spent on a motherboard with 4 mem slots, an aftermarket heatsink and fan for 20 or 30, a couple of extra fans and a better wifi card would be all that's needed.I did contact support about the wifi performance (wasn't sure if the card was faulty at the start) and the response was SUPER fast, matter of minutes (I used the form on their website) and my response to the email I got back was again responded to in no time flat.VERY IMPRESSED OVERALL.