Syber Vapor K review

With the impending arrival of Steam Machines, the living room has suddenly become the heated new battleground for PC manufacturers as everyone attempts to fit powerful PC components into tinier cases. The Syber gaming brand is an off-shoot from Cyberpower that focuses purely on this living room PC console-like experience.

While the tiny Alienware Alpha is undeniably a console-sized gaming PC, the same can’t be said of the Vapor K unless you’re referring to the era of the original Xbox. It’s certainly smaller than your typical mid-tower gaming PC, but will still take up a rather large amount of space underneath your TV.

The 351x345x98.5mm chassis has an overall shape that does somewhat hark back to the original Xbox. There’s an exposed fan exhaust with no filter on the top that concerns us slightly, as dust has the potential to get inside when it’s turned off. There are a few other minor design issues as well, such as the upside down USB ports on the front.

The Vapor K is available in either white or black but you can customise it using a discrete button on the side, which cycles the strip of LEDs running along the front of the system between different colours. One of the settings turns the lighting off completely, which will be useful if you find them distracting.

Syber has several different Vapor configurations with differing base specifications you can then customise. Prices range from between £499 up to £1,249 and each version is given its own unique name. The model we reviewed, the Vapor K, is available for £999, which makes it more expensive than even the top-end Alienware Alpha.

The larger case does bring with it some benefits, however; namely a more powerful graphics card. While the Alpha used a graphics card based on a notebook GPU, the Vapor K is able to accommodate a proper desktop card in the form of an Nvidia GTX 970 with 4GB of GDDR5 memory. A desktop class Intel i5-4690K processor running at 3.5GHz is also used, along with 8GB of memory and a 2½in 1TB hard disk.

Performance in our desktop application benchmark was slightly above what we would expect given the components, scoring 105 overall and making the Syber Vapor K a decent choice for tasks beyond living room gaming.

If you’re looking for a system that will give current generation games consoles a run for their money, the Vapor K did well here, too. Dirt Showdown at 1080p saw 112.8fps with Ultra graphics and 4x anti-aliasing. Tomb Raider also saw a silky 64.9fps with 2x SSAA and Ultimate level of graphics quality. In Metro Last Light Redux the system produced 45.3fps with SSAA turned on, with this increasing to 77fps with SSAA turned off. The GTX 970 was unsurprisingly an excellent performer.

While gaming and under load, however, the system is reasonably noisy with the fans spinning up to high speeds to keep the components cool. The chassis also becomes particularly warm to the touch, so you’ll need to make sure there is adequate ventilation if you put the machine in an AV cabinet.