CyberPower Gamer Ultra Stealth review

The Gamer Ultra Stealth has a case to match its name.

The all-black Silverstone Raven has a design reminiscent of the stealth bomber. It's also innovative, with several neat touches. The main change is the orientation of the motherboard, which instead of facing towards the back of the case, is rotated through 90° to face upwards. This means that the motherboard's ports and the expansion card's backplates are on the top of the case. making them far easier to access. A panel covers the ports to keep everything neat and tidy.

CyberPower has made some extra effort inside as well. The processor is one of AMD's latest, the 3GHz Phenom II X4 940, which has been overclocked to 3.6GHz. For gaming there's a fast Radeon HD 4870 graphics card, which has 1GB of memory rather than the usual 512MB.

The Gamer Ultra Stealth produced an impressive, but not outstanding, score in PCMark Vantage. It's quick enough to handle demanding applications, but those looking for the most powerful PC should consider an Intel Core-i7 based system. A score of 58.2fps in our Call of Duty 4 benchmark shows that it will be able run most titles at high frame rates. To give it a real test we set the detail levels in Crysis to maximum, and it still managed a playable 31.7fps

It's good to see two optical drives fitted - a Blu-ray read-only drive and a DVD writer - so you can rip an audio CD or burn a DVD while watching a movie or playing a game, for example. Its 4GB of memory is sufficient for most tasks, though 8GB would have been nice on a PC at this price. The 750GB hard disk offers plenty of room for storing your files.

The 22in Samsung SM2233BW monitor has great image quality, but its native resolution is only 1,680x 1,050pixels. Many recent 22in models have a full-HD resolution of 1,920x1,080. Logitech's X-540 speakers consist of a beefy subwoofer with five satellites, providing excellent audio quality. Bass is deep and resounding, and treble sounds clear. They're ideal for listening to music, watching films or playing games.

Our biggest problem with the Gamer Ultra Stealth is its cost. With its innovative case, powerful processor and capable graphics card, there's plenty to like about it, but we feel that a higher-resolution monitor would have gone a long way to justifying its high price. When compared to the £800 PCs in this month's Labs, there's simply not enough here to make it worth the extra £599.

Author: Mike Jennings