CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 Review

$999.00

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Tim Robben

May 27, 2020

5863 Views

8.4 Total Score

EXCELLENT

PROS

Stellar performance
Well-priced given the parts inside
Great for fast-paced 1080p
Impeccable attention to detail

CONS

No flash-card reader

Build it yourself, or simply go with a prebuilt gaming rig? The CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 delivers the best of both worlds – offering you a prebuilt option that you can upgrade to fit your needs. Again, in the Gamer Xtreme Series, you have different prebuilt configurations to meet most budgets, maxing out with eight-core Intel Core i9 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 20-class graphics cards. Other high-end configuration options include liquid cooling and full LED case lighting.

Spotless attention to design, impeccable part selection and solid overall performance in our review model make the Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 an appealing choice for a gaming mid-tower at its value-packed price. In fact, it is builds on the success of our Editors’ choice from last year, the CyberpowerPC Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A7, but it now packs more storage (240GB SSD + 1TB HDD). For all these, it’s our newest Top Pick for midrange gaming desktop PCs.

Need more gaming PC options? Check out our Best Gaming PCs for 2019

Design

The CyberPowerPC GXiVR8060A8 isn’t an off-the-shelf desktop, produced for the mass market. While the chassis and certain internal components are branded by CyberPowerPC, they’re all standard parts with aftermarket equivalents.

Lately, CyberPowerPC has become a common brand in the custom-gaming niche, so we’re not surprised that most parts used inside are aftermarket, and that includes the motherboard and graphics card. You’ll be able to locate most of the parts used here online. That’s part of the allure of getting a prebuilt desktop from a system builder with a notable presence in the market.

Back to the design, this Gamer Xtreme is set on a mid-tower chassis, measuring 18 by 7.9 by 18.4 inches (HWD). It uses a larger Intel b360 Chipset that offers enough space to add components, and is roomy enough for your hands to move around when making upgrades. The system’s internal components are accessible via a removable side panel that’s held in place by thumbscrews, that essentially offer tool-less access.

Once you remove the tinted glass panel, you can now access the motherboard, solid-state drive, RAM and graphics card. The power supply and hard drive are found behind a metal side panel on the opposite side. The tinted glass panel looks clean on the system when switched off, and the trio-of LED rings on the front panel looks even better when the machine is running. All that is accented by excellent cable arrangement, that keeps things tidy and helps with airflow.

Ports

Port selection along the front edge includes separate headphone and microphone jacks, and a pair of USB Type-A 3.0 ports. On the same flank, you also have a power button, a reset button, and a drive activity light up. We’d prefer a flash-card reader in this spot, though. That’s about one of the few conveniences missing here. On the bottom, you have four raised feet with rubber pads to give the Gamer Xtreme some breathing room from the underside.

On the back of the tower, there are other ports including six USB ports, Ethernet jack, two legacy PS/2 ports to accommodate your older mouse and keyboard connections, audio and headphone jacks, and video output ports, including DisplayPort and HDMI connections.

Our review unit tops with a GTX 1660 graphics card, but you have units in the same series with the beefier RTX card, meaning you don’t get USB-C here (available in the high-end models), but still a good configuration for the price. While the GTX 1660 delivers enough power to drive a VR headset, and the RTX 2080 includes a USB-C port, meaning it you can benefit from the single VirtualLink connector. With the Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 you’ll have to do with multiple cables to drive your headset.

Performance

While you’ll be buying the Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 for gaming, that doesn’t mean it can’t do other tasks around the house. In fact, I see small business owners and home users integrating such systems into their daily operations, thanks to the machine’s capable processor and graphics card. We are looking at a 9^th-generation Intel Core i5-9400F (2.9GHz), 8GB DDR4 RAM, 240GB SSD and 1TB hard drive running on Windows 10 Home operating system.

Paired with a Full HD monitor like the Sceptre E255B-1658A or the Acer SB220Q bi, that’s a solid feature set that will let you run the most of demanding tasks around. You can browse the web, do some photo editing, run some demanding applications like Photoshop. It’s also possible to do video encoding, although you’ll need more time to complete graphic-intensive tasks, but its performance is well above the upper-range of budget desktop PCs.

Nvidia GTX 1660 & Virtual Reality

Our review unit offers an entry-level Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 graphics card, something most enthusiast gamers will find likeable, especially those who don’t need features like real-time ray tracing and deep learning super sampling (DLSS) found on high-end Turing graphics cards like the RTX 2080 Super found on the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8080A7.

With the GTX 1660, Nvidia gives up on technologies like DLSS in order to hit a lower price point, and it looks like a winning strategy for midrange gamers who don’t have a budget for the most expensive graphics card around. However, this TU116 GPU raises the question of just how low Nvidia is willing to go with its Turing architecture.

Unlike the high-end RTX 2080, the GeForce GTX 1660 (6GB) trims down to a readily available GDDR5 instead of the newer GDDR6, along with fewer CUDA cores and less other elements. The result is what you’ve already guessed: a slightly lower but more affordable graphics card for budget gaming/mainstream PCs.

At the end of the day, you’re getting more performance for less money – it even supports VR headsets. And, that’s great. For instance, you get some architectural enhancements, higher clock speeds, more shade cores over last year’s Nvidia GTX 1060 (GPU). The GPU at the heart of the GTX 1660 is the same as TU116 found in the 1660 Ti, only that two SMs have been disabled, in turn disabling 128 CUDA cores and 8 texture units.

Gaming Performance

The new GTX 1660 graphics card does a good job on modern Triple-A games, delivering better frame rates per second (FPS) than its closest rivals, when playing at 1080p. It plays Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey at 1080p (Very High Quality) at 64fps, which is slightly higher than the Radeon RX Vega’s 62 fps, much better than the GTX 1060’s 57 fps played at the same settings.

The same solid performance is replicated on games like The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt (57 fps, 54 fps, 48 fps) and Warframe (170 fps, 151 fps, 152 fps), respectively. Since the Nvidia GTX 1660 manages to deliver smooth playability on modern titles like Civilization VI and Fortnite at over 60 fps, makes for a win for gamers on a budget.

The CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 has all the qualities a gaming desktop might have if you built it yourself and applied lots of TLC, spanning top-notch aftermarket parts to sleek wiring and assembly. You’d normally pay a premium over and above the sum of parts used in this machine, but the premium is nominal if you opt for a pre-built system.

It won’t be easy to get a big-brand prebuilt desktop at this price, and you’d potentially spend more if you opt to build one yourself – again, you’d be losing out on the custom-built vibe a d attention to detail on the CYBERPOWERPC GXiVR8060A8, among other things.

Is there a better alternative?

Unless you’re willing to spend more for better components, the GXiVR8060A8 is one of the best entry-level gaming PCs in the market today. For more money, the CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Supreme SLC8260A2 offers an Intel Core i7-9700K processor, a true Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 (8GB) Turing graphics card, 16GB of RAM and a 1TB NVMe SSD storage.

It’s interesting to see CyberPowerPC offer gamers solid alternatives that are more affordable in their respective categories (entry-level and mid-range), with both systems packing great designs and impeccable features for the prices.

Should you buy it?

Absolutely. The CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme GXiVR8060A8 makes about as compelling of an argument to go with a prebuilt gaming tower as we can imagine. It delivers strong performance, is future-proof and is not expensive. The only thing you’ll miss are the excitement of rolling your own, if that’s your thing.

OUR PICK