CYBERPOWER ULTRA 5 RX
Fast, and well balanced with plenty of storage – only the noisiness and lack of internal upgrades disappoint
Building a high-performance system to a mid-range budget always involves compromise. Here CyberPower has made a smart, well-balanced PC for mainstream users, packing in the month’s CPU of choice – AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600 – in a big case with plenty of storage. The compromise? There’s only 8GB of RAM, while the graphics card is based on the AMD Radeon RX 570 rather than Nvidia’s more formidable GeForce GTX 1060, as found in the Mesh and Palicomp systems.
If playing games isn’t your priority, that’s fine. At stock, the RX 570 comes with a 1,244MHz boost clock – the clock speed it jumps to when running games – but this MSI model is pre-overclocked to boost to 1,268MHz. (You can push it up to 1,300MHz if you wish.) The result is smooth frame rates at 1080p resolutions and high to very high detail levels, while 1440p gaming is on the cards in many games if you reduce the detail settings slightly. Arguably, the Radeon RX 570 is a better choice than the 1050 Ti cards found in rival systems.
But what about 2D performance for mainstream applications? Here there’s good news; the six-core, 12-thread Ryzen 5 1600 powers the CyberPower to third place in the benchmark table, with a very good score in our multitasking tests. Given that one of the systems above it has an overclocked CPU, while the other has 16GB of RAM, that’s a great result.
That CPU is socketed in an MSI A320M Pro-VD/S motherboard; an odd choice given that you have a compact micro-ATX motherboard inside a huge CoolerMaster MasterLite 5 case with very little else in it. CyberPower could comfortably have fitted a full-sized ATX motherboard inside, giving buyers the benefit of additional PCI-E expansion slots. As is, there aren’t any left usable, though with an 802.11n PCI-E x1 WiFi card fitted, this might not be an issue.
8GB of RAM is fine for most applications, but if you’re editing 4K video or working with a lot of highresolution images, adding another 8GB could be a sensible investment. Here there’s a bit of a challenge in that AMD’s Wraith Spire cooler overhangs the spare DIMM slot, but you could squeeze a low-profile module in there.
Otherwise, this is a wellconsidered build, with the cabling out of sight and the drives squirreled away in a side-facing cage in a separate compartment with the 600W Cooler Master PSU. Like CCL, CyberPower has gone one better than the rest when it comes to storage, backing up the 240GB Corsair Force LE SSD with a 2TB Seagate Barracuda. If that’s not enough, there’s space for one more 3.5in disk above the supplied drives.
The Corsair SSD isn’t a spectacular performer: its sequential speeds maxed out at 444.5MB/sec read and 367.8MB/sec write in our tests. But Windows boots rapidly and apps don’t hang around when loading.
Neither the Ryzen 5 1600 nor the RX570 graphics card lead the way on power efficiency, and the CyberPower uses noticeably more wattage when running at full-tilt than the Intelbased Chillblast or the GTX 1050TIsporting Wired2Fire, using 195W to their 128W and 131W respectively. The case also doesn’t do an awful lot to dampen noise, so you can hear the fans spin up and hum louder when the CPU and GPU are pushed hard.
For some, the size and noise of the CyberPower will put it out of contention, and if you’re more interested in playing games than running demanding creative apps, the Palicomp, Mesh and CCL machines are a better bet. Yet the CyberPower gives you a lot of processing power and storage for the money, so it’s still worth a place on your shortlist.