Cube Raptor Gaming PC Review

Introduction

It is no secret that there are a lot of people who are interested in gaming PCs but do not have the time or the experience to build their own. It is also no secret that PCs made by gimmicky system builders like Alienware are over-priced and are not good value for money, you are mainly paying for the brand name and reputation and get very little hardware for your money. So what other options do you have? Buying from a system integrator is rapidly becoming a popular alternative, with the constant year-on-year growth in the PC gaming industry it is no wonder that there are more system integrators to choose from than ever before.

Today we are taking a look at a gaming system made by the system integrator called Cube. We are checking out their Cube Raptor Gaming PC which offers up a sweet-spot balance of components at a fairly attractive sub-£700 price point. The Raptor boasts the latest Core i5 Haswell Refresh CPU from Intel with the flagship Z97 chipset as well as a 2GB AMD R7 265 overclocked graphics card and 8GB of DDR3. Interestingly, there’s no either/or rubbish going on with the storage – Cube have equipped a hybrid drive so it can bring the benefits of an SSD and large capacity HDD to an attractive price point. All in all this system has an interesting mix of components and is finished off nicely with In Win’s GT1 gaming mid tower case. Check out the full specifications of this system below:

Specifications

• Name: Cube Raptor Gaming PC
• Case: In Win GT1 Mid Tower
• Motherboard: MSI Z97-G43 LGA 1150 socket
• Processor: Intel Core i5 4590 “Haswell Refresh” Quad Core (3.3GHz Base 3.7GHz Turbo) LGA 1150 socket
• Processor Cooler: Stock Intel Heatsink
• System Memory: 1 x 8GB DDR3 Kingston HyperX Fury 1866MHz (Blue)
• Main Boot Drive: Seagate 1TB Hybrid Solid State Hard Drive with 8GB SSD Cache
• Additional Storage Drive(s): Not included
• Graphics card: MSI R7 265 OC 2GB GDDR5
• Power Supply: Cooler Master Elite 500W
• Optical Drive: Super WriteMaster DVD RW
• Wireless: TP-Link TL-WN781ND PCIe 150mbps 2.4GHz WiFi card
• Monitor: Not included
• Peripherals: Not included
• OS: Windows 8.1 64 Bit
• Warranty: 2 Year Warranty (14 Day Swap Out,1st Year collect and return, 2nd Year Return to Base)
• Price: £669.99 including VAT (accurate at the time of writing)

Packaging & Accessories

We received the Cube Raptor Gaming PC in the usual format: a large cardboard outer box within which we find the system in the box that the In Win case came in. There’s some additional protective polystyrene to protect the inner box from bumps and on top of it all is the motherboard box which contains all the manuals, documentation, cables and adapters that came with components in the system that you might need.

As we can see the inner box is in perfect condition and has sustained no damage in transit, this means it was packaged well.

Inside the motherboard box we find lots of documentation for the system components, a power cable for the system, various CDs, a VGA to DVI adapter and the wireless antenna for the WiFi PCI express card.

Before we get stuck in to looking at the product let’s just take a minute to familiarise ourselves with the stars of the show; the Intel Core i5 4590 and the AMD R7 265 OC.

CPU-Z

GPU-Z