MaximumPC 2006 12

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 777 7777 777

30 MAXIMUMPC DECEMBER 2006

8

INFINITY CROSSFIRE

$2,500, http://www.cyberpowerpc.com

W

hen the CyberPower Gamer

Infi nity CrossFire tumbled off the

truck at our loading dock, we

immediately thought two things: 1) That’s an

insanely long name for a PC, and 2) There’s

no way this thing can sell for $2,500. Then

we fi red it up.

On paper, the CyberPower is a mon-

strous machine for the money. A 2.93GHz

Intel Core 2 Extreme X6800 sits atop an

Intel D975XBX mobo, backed by 2GB of

DDR2/800 RAM, with a pair of 512MB ATI

Radeon X1950 XTXs in CrossFire mode.

With specs like those, we half-expected to

see this system tear up the benchmarks

and give higher-end gaming PCs a run for

their money. Heck, we were even willing to

forgive its wildly unattractive CoolerMaster

Mystique 632 enclosure. But this little

piggy came out

of its box with

a few nagging

glitches—includ-

ing a persistent

and deeply rooted

Windows system

registry error

that commanded

attention every

time we booted

the machine—that

plagued the rig

throughout our

bench tests.

At fi rst blush,

the specs handily outweighed the bugs,

as CyberPower’s CrossFire GPU team

consistently punched out frame rates in

the mid-90s on our FEAR benchmark. But

the more we tested, the less consistent the

results, eventually plummeting to a far less

noteworthy (but still respectable) 74fps,

and eventually bottoming out at 49fps.

Fortunately, the system retained its teeth in

our other benchmarks, racking up 137.8fps

in Quake 4 and leading the pack with a

commanding 42.9fps in the 3DMark

Deep Freeze test.

The Gamer Infi nity CrossFire did just

as well in applications performance thanks

to the X6800 CPU, losing to only the highly

overclocked Overdrive in our Premiere and

Nero Recode 2 tests. The clock speeds,

however, couldn’t out-muscle the hard

drive dependency of our Photoshop test,

and the CyberPower fi nished behind the

RAID-equipped machines.

For such a feature-packed box, this

system lacks those little touches that

separate the good machines from the

truly great. Where the folks at Velocity

Micro and Alienware took the time to

add aesthetic touches such as neatly

gathered cabling, the CyberPower rig is

clearly strapped with a mess of zip ties.

Of course, given that the hardware in this

system ate almost the entire $2,500 bud-

get, the company probably couldn’t afford

the few extra hours of labor required to

tidy up the interior.

Even with its fl aws, however, the

CyberPower is a pretty mean machine for

the money, even rivaling some far pricier

systems in its Quake 4 and 3DMark06 per-

formance. But when you’re spending your

hard-earned ducats—even just 2,500 of

your ducats—on a gaming rig, you want it

to perform fl awlessly. So even though this

system outran the Overdrive in most of the

gaming tests, its fl aky performance, quick-

and-dirty assembly, and fugly case cost it

the top spot.

CyberPower Gamer

Infinity CrossFire

Jam-packed with great hardware; dogged by small glitches

That freakish, bat-winged case may

not look like much, but inside lurks

this little monster’s Core 2 Extreme

X6800 CPU.

HOW CYBERPOWER SPENT $2,

An ATI Radeon X1950 XTX CrossFire combo pumped out killer

frame rates in our gaming benchmarks.

CPU/MOBO 50%

STORAGE 3.2%

GRAPHICS 33.6% OTHER 13.2%