Verdict

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC is a fantastic buy for those looking to play video games in Full HD as cheaply as possible. If you're looking to play in 4K or prefer a more flashy design, then you'll need to spend more, but bargain hunters who don't want the hassle of hunting for cheap components will find it tough to find a better deal.

Pros

• Great value Full HD gaming performance
• Plenty of airflow and room for upgrading
• Huge range of upgrades available

Cons

• No-frills case design
• Low read and write SSD speeds
• Not capable of Quad HD at 60fps for modern AAA games

What is the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC?

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC is a custom-built gaming PC configured specifically to get incredible value for HD gaming.

While you have the option of mixing and matching various other components and cases on offer, computer retailer Cyberpower has cherry picked what it believes to be the best components to perfectly balance performance and price.

Those components include the Gigabyte GTX 1660 graphics card, AMD Ryzen 5 2500X processor and Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR4 RAM for the best assemble since the Avengers.

There’s no question that the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC is a very capable gaming computer, but does it offer good value for the £725 price, or are you better off building a PC yourself?

Related: Best Gaming PC 2019

Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC – Design

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC had a tough job looking premium and simultaneously retaining an affordable price. Cyberpower UK has done a great job though, opting for the ONYXIA Mid-Tower Black Gaming Case. It’s a simple case with a black metal front emblazoned with the orange Cyberpower logo, and a tempered glass panel fixed to the size that shows off all the internals, which is important since it’s the components that boasts most of this desktop’s visual flair.

The single fan here doesn’t look like much, but just wait until the Ultra 5 GTX is plugged in and everything starts moving…

The internal fans have been treated to an RGB lighting upgrade, which pulse red once you power on the desktop. Other than that though, the inside looks bare. Cyberpower has ensured there’s plenty of free space inside the case, so there’s plenty of airflow to prevent components hotting up and to allow users to easily add larger graphics cards if they fancy an upgrade.

If you do decide to upgrade, be aware that changing the graphics card requires a lot of fiddling with a screwdriver, but it shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes. Thanks to the amount of space inside the case, it’s easy to locate and access the components. Cable ties also keep everything looking tidy, which is an understated boon. If there’s any criticism here, it’s that the hard drive and SSD are bundled into a hidden compartment along with the PSU, which makes them more inconvenient to swap out.

Just two Type-A USB 3.0 ports sit up at the top of the Ultra 5 GTX here, next to 3.5mm jacks for a mic and heapdhones.

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC has a huge number of ports on offer. On top of the case, you’ll find two USB-A ports and a headphone jack, and on the rear you’ll discover 6 additional USB-A slots, and an Ethernet port, and on the GPU, an HDMI port and a few DisplayPorts. It’s a little disappointing there are no USB-C ports here, as they’re growing increasingly popular, but it’s not too surprising, since this is a budget case.

Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC – Specifications

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC has an absolutely enormous range of components on offer. You can pick from eight AMD Ryzen CPUs and a whopping 18 graphics cards, with both Nvidia and AMD variants available. Of course, it’s basically impossible to review every single one of these configurations, so this review will focus solely on the configuration Cyberpower sent us.

With an AMD Ryzen 5 2500X providing the CPU power and the Gigabyte GTX 1660 6GB graphics card responsible for spitting out images, this configuration of the Cyberpower desktop is a mid-range gaming PC, prioritising value for money over anything else. You won’t find fancy features here, such as ray tracing or DLSS, but you can expect a respectable Full HD performance.

The best thing about ordering through a retailer such as Cyberpower is that it’s dead easy to mix and match your components. That said, there’s not much I’d want to change here, with Cyberpower somehow managing to squeeze in 1TB of storage, 8GB DDR4 RAM and a high-powered cooling fan without seeing the price dramatically rise.

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While there are few front-facing ports, you get a lot of (mostly older) connectivity options on the rear side of the Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC.

Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC – Performance

Ogling a spec sheet doesn’t tell you the whole story. It’s the performance figures that really matter, so we’ve conducted various benchmark tests to see how powerful the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC truly is.

Unfortunately, we’ve only recently reviewed high-end gaming desktop computers, so we don’t really have any computers at a similar level as the Cyberpower for comparison. Instead, we’ve sized it up against the Alienware Aurora R8 and MSI Trident X gaming desktops, which house the RTX 2080 Ti and RTX 2080 graphics cards respectively. That’s admittedly an unfair contest, with those two desktops costing close to £2000 more, but such data should at least tell you how far the Cyberpower’s performance is away from the best of the best.

With the Cyberpower UK using an AMD Ryzen 5 2500X processor compared to the Alienware Aurora R8’s super-speedy Intel Core i9-9900K, the latter was always going to come out on top with a sizeable margin in our CPU benchmark test. This means the Aurora R8 is far better for CPU intensive titles such as Warhammer 2 and Civilization 6 where enemy AI processes are elaborate and loading times can be lengthy. For the likes of RPGs and fast-paced battle royale shooters though, you probably wouldn’t notice much of a difference between the two machines.

The AMD Ryzen 5 2500X processor will be powerful enough to handle any game, with processors rarely acting as the bottleneck these days. The graphics card is far more important to consider as it has a major impact on a game’s visuals and performance.

Unsurprisingly, the Aurora R8 posted far superior GPU benchmark results compared to the Cyberpower thanks to the RTX 2080 Ti graphics card. But the Cyberpower’s 5868 3DMark Fire Strike Ultra result shouldn’t be sniffed at, with it’s GTX 1660 GPU powerful enough to offer a solid Full HD performance that isn’t too far behind the grunt of the MSI Trident X’s RTX 2080 card. 

Truth be told, GPU benchmark tests tell you very little about how the computer performs in reality. In-game benchmark tests are a much better way to measure real-time performance, so we ran tests on a number of games including Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Ghost Recon Wildlands and Rise of the Tomb Raider to see how the Cyberpower desktop performs.

We chose Shadow of the Tomb Raider since it’s one of the most GPU-demanding games currently available. This is shown with the Cyberpower struggling to offer a decent frame rate when outputting at a 4K or Quad HD resolution. Full HD is a different story though, with the custom-built desktop hitting 58fps which is just shy of the golden standard 60fps mark. This result may not be exceptional, but it’s certainly high enough to offer smooth visuals that will satisfy the majority of gamers.

Ghost Recon Wildlands is another graphically intensive title, but the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC punches above its weight with the frame rate recordings here. When the game’s set to Full HD, the desktop is able to run it at a mighty impressive 72fps. Even the Quad HD performance is perfectly playable at 54fps, although the average frame rate of 30fps when set to 4K is likely too low for a satisfactory experience.

Rise of the Tomb Raider is noticeably older than the other games here, but was one of the most GPU-demanding titles back in 2015, so is a great benchmark to use if you want to find out how a system will perform with older titles.

You’ll comfortably be able to play Rise of the Tomb Raider in Quad HD and Full HD, seeing average frame rate performances of 52fps and 60fps respectively. Sticking with the pattern, 4K performance isn’t up to scratch, seeing only a 31fps performance. The Alienware Aurora R8 managed 63fps on average in 4K in comparison, but you’d be paying a lot more money for the privilege.

Overall, the results are pretty clear, with the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC struggling to play games in 4K, but comfortably running modern AAA games in Full HD at 60fps. I also found this system capable of playing select games in Quad HD at a respectable frame rate, although it’s probably best to stick to Full HD for the very latest AAA titles. To get such a performance at this price is incredibly impressive, and has to be one of the best value Full HD gaming desktop options available.

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The Cooler Master Masterliquid Lite 120 Liquid Cooling System ensures the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC never gets toasty when playing AAA games or running complex software. The cooling system is a single-fan offering, which should be absolutely fine with the mid-range components packed inside the computer. But if you later upgrade to a 9th Generation i9 Intel Core processor, you’ll probably need to upgrade the cooling system to a double or triple-fan offering. 

There have been certain areas where the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC has shown the full extent of its budget cutting, particularly the storage. While the 1TB Seagate BarraCuda SATA-III Hard Drive should have enough space to fit a decent number of games, it has really poor read and write speeds at 215.8 MB/s and 215.9 MB/s, which means games saved on this drive will serve you tediously lengthy loading screens and saving times.

The inclusion of the 240GB SSD is presumably there to give gamers the option to boost read and write speeds, but Cyberpower has opted for a bargain bin SSD that only has read and write speeds of 479.9 MB/s and 174.8 MB/s respectively – that’s hardly any better than the SATA HHD. I honestly recommend upgrading to an M.2 SSD, as the default storage options are by far the worst aspects in this otherwise terrific PC package. 

Related: Best Intel Processor 2019

Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC – Overclocking

While I was able to push an impressive 200MHz overclock with the GTX 1660 in the Trusted Reviews test rig, here I noticed no difference in performance beyond a 40MHz increase on both the GPU and the RAM.

I ran Unigine’s Heaven benchmark in a permanent loop and increased GPU and RAM load by 20MHz at a time, keeping an eye on frame rate counts and temperature.  While I could muster a 200MHz overclock on the GPU and 100MHz on the RAM before things started to become unstable, there’s little practical benefit to you doing this.

Again, as with the 200MHz overclock we saw on the 1660, I would squeeze out a 4-8fps boost in the games I benchmarked – Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Ghost Recon: Wildlands. 

Running Shadow at 4K proved challenging – the benchmark actually crashed the first two times I tried to run it. While I was successfully able to complete one benchmark, and get a nice 8fps jump for my trouble, everything was so choppy and unstable that I wouldn’t be confident playing a game like this with the GPU overclocked. Ghost Recon was a lot more stable, but gains here were minimal.

Why buy the Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC?

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC offers fantastic value for Full HD gaming, with key components such as the Gigabyte GTX 1660 graphics card and AMD Ryzen 5 2500X processor bundled it at significantly cheaper prices than what they’d sell for individually at other retailers. And while Cyberpower has pre-built this system to find the perfect balance between performance and price, there’s no stopping you making your own tweaks with a seriously large range of components available to purchase on the site. 

Our benchmark tests prove this desktop is capable of at least 60fps in Full HD for even the most intensive modern AAA titles, so you’ll rarely need to bother reading the system requirements before downloading a game from Steam. This computer is even capable of Quad HD with older titles, but you’ll need to look elsewhere if you fancy a 4K setup.

Of course, Cyberpower has cut corners to achieve such an affordable system, with underwhelming read and write speeds thanks to the budget SSD drive, and an uninspired case design that can’t compete with the flashy systems that major manufacturers sell. But when you’re getting a solid HD gaming desktop for little over £700, such flaws are easy to forgive.

Verdict

The Cyberpower Ultra 5 GTX Gaming PC is a fantastic buy for those looking to play video games in Full HD for as cheap as possible. If you’re looking to play in 4K or prefer a more flashy design, then you’ll need to spend more, but bargain hunters who don’t want the hassle of hunting for cheap components will find it tough to find a better deal.

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