Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro AMD Gaming PC Review

I was really excited when I heard that Cyberpower PC was sending me a system to review. Not because of the brand (albeit they are excellent system-builders), but because of what was in it. Cyberpower PC answered my prayers by being one of the main (and few) PC builders currently on the market to create a pre-built fully-AMD based system. Something that is still (bizarrely) rare, despite the popularity of the Ryzen 3000 processors and, of course, their latest RX 5700 XT graphics card! Put simply, I was all over this when it arrived! Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro Gaming PC Review The Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro features a 3rd-generation Ryzen processor and one of the brand new MSI Radeon 5700 XT MECH graphics cards. That isn't, however, the only key selling point here. Cyberpower PC has fully customized all of the system fans in this design replacing them with a custom RGB design that comes with a pretty cool remote control. If that wasn't enough, it also features some other pretty cool tricks including an amazingly punchy RGB strip to the inside of the case. So, it has some solid specifications and some amazing eye-candy. Let's take a closer look! Specifications CPU (Processor): AMD Ryzen 5 3600 - 6-Core 3.60GHz, 4.2GHz Turbo - 32MB L3 Cache Processor, Pro OC CompatibleCPU Cooling: Corsair Hydro Series H45 High-Performance Liquid Cooling system w/ 120mm Radiator, Extreme OC Compatible (Corsair CPU Water Cooling, Extreme OC Compatible)Motherboard: MSI B450-A Pro MAX: ATX w/ RGB, USB 3.1, SATA3, 1x M.2Memory (RAM): 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4/3200mhz of HyperX Fury Graphics Card (GPU): MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Mech OC 8GB - DX12® - VR Ready, HDMI, DVI, DP, 5 Monitor Support (Single Card)PSU (Power Supply): Corsair Vengeance Series 650M 650W 80+ Silver Gaming Power SupplyCase: Corsair Carbide Spec-Delta Black ATX RGB Gaming Mid-Tower (inc x3 RGB fans) - Case Upgrades (Fans and Lighting): 6x 120mm Cyberpower Addressable Dual Light Loop RGB 1200RPM Fans with Remote ControlM.2 SSD Drive: 512GB (1x512GB) ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD - 3500MB/s Read & 3000MB/s Write (Single Drive)Hard Drive (HDD & SSHD): 2TB Seagate BarraCuda SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hard Drive (1 Drive) For more details on the system and specifications, you can visit the official Cyberpower PC website via the link here! Accessories As this is a pre-built system, you clearly don't require much out of the box to get this running. In fact, all you have to do is plug in your peripherals, switch on the power and away you go! You do, however, get a number of useful tools with your system. You have the graphics card drivers and manual, a quick installation guide, the spare PSU cables (not used in the build) and the remote control that handles all of the RGB goodness at your fingertips. Speaking of the RGB, while the main system (and cooler) originally came with Corsair 120mm fans, these have all been replaced with customer RGB designs compatible with the controller thanks to the internal control hub. Cyberpower PC does, however, give you the old fans should you wish to swap back. Although we have no idea why you would want to do that! Win This PC! That's right, you can enter our latest competition to win this system right here! The Exterior The Corsair Carbide Spec-Delta Black ATX RGB Gaming Mid-Tower comes in a deep black gloss finish. The front of the system has a plastic casing with angled vents to the base and top. The side panel features a tinted acrylic window. I must admit that while this is nice, I do think it is perhaps a little too tinted. It's legitimately hard to see inside without the RGB lighting being on. So, perhaps this fills a middle ground of having a tidy presentation when the system is turned off but allowing the RGB to shine through when switched on. With a large ventilation panel to the top (with a magnetic anti-dust covering) the system chassis is a nice and solid choice. It does, of course, have a few little aesthetic touches. Exterior Detailing While the chassis does have some nice aesthetic touches in terms of its angular design to the front and ventilation panels, there are of course a few little added touches. Most notably is the Cyberpower PC logo which is just to the base of the front of the case. Despite this being (clearly) an aftermarket addition, it actually fits in really well and you at least have to credit it for doing that when so many other manufacturers would've just stuck anything with their name here. Ports and Connections The front (top) of the chassis has your main 'regular' system controls (as you might expect). These include two USB 3.1 ports, a single headphone/microphone 3.5mm port, a reset switch and the main power button. Rear I/O Panel The main I/O panel has all the connections you would usually expect to see. You have two standard USB 2.0 ports, 5 USB 3.1 ports, an ethernet port, your audio output/input bank, an old-style keyboard/mouse adaptor, and the main display output ports. Remember, since this is a Ryzen 3000 processor it does come with an integrated Vega graphics adaptor and, as such, unlike older Ryzen designs, these can serve a purpose. Having that 'BIOS Flashback' switch, however, is a great bit of added protection to your motherboard. The graphics card features 3 display port adaptors and a single HDMI port. The space below is part of the 2.5 slot design, well-known in the Radeon 5700 XT design which acts, essentially, as part of the ventilation. Finally, you have the power supply to the base. This is fairly standard and as you can see operates with a standard on/off switch and 3-pin output. You are, incidentally, provided with a power cable suitable for your region. Ventilation & Air Flow Starting with the front ventilation, there are two main airflow intakes. Both have a nice angular design with one at the base and one at the top. The one at the base is notably larger than the upper vent, but with 3 fans all bringing in nice and cool air, this should provide plenty of airflow. Albeit, no dust protectors appear to be included so a little 'housekeeping' may be necessary as the months of usage rolls by. The system has 3 exhaust fans courtesy of the main rear exhaust (which is attached to the Corsair H45 AIO cooler) and two 120mm fans to the top of the system. As noted earlier in this review, the top fans do have a magnetic dust cover which can be easily removed and cleaned. What is clear, however, is that with 3 fans coming in and 3 fans blowing out, this should have a nice and solid airflow. A factor of importance particularly for that AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT which is known to get a little warm. Overall So, taking the overall system aesthetics from an exterior standpoint, everything looks really good. This is a nice chassis that provides some excellent airflow and practical applications. All in all, we expect to see some nice and cool performance with some nice and cool aesthetics! A Look Inside At a quick glance, the system interior looks very clean and tidy. There are no errant cables beyond those necessary in the design and even with the AIO cooler pipes (an aspect that can often be messy), it actually still looks well organized. So, so far things are looking excellent. Cyberpower PC seems to have put together a nice looking build here in the Ultra 5 RX Pro. Let's take a closer look at some of the components and design aspects that really make this system tick! Back Panel Removing the back panel, similar to what we saw at a glance inside the system, we again see some really excellent cable management from Cyberpower PC. Everything is neatly bundled and attached to the chassis. With no masses of cables sprouting from every angle, you'll have no problems here removing and re-attaching the panel! In this area, you will find the Cyberpower PC controller hub for the RGB fans/lights which, if you remember from earlier, comes with a remote control to provide you with the highest level of customization possible. Motherboard The motherboard used in this system is an MSI B450-A Pro MAX. MSI, of course, has an excellent reputation with motherboards and with the release of Ryzen, this was really cemented further with their B450 range of products. Processor/Cooler The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 processor in this system is cooled by a Corsair H45 AIO design. In addition, the pipes leading to the radiator have also managed to fall in place without looking obtrusive to the overall aesthetics. Something rarely achieved in AIO coolers. Graphics Card With an MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Mech OC 8GB graphics card, you have a nice new (in terms of release - only around 2-4 weeks old at the time of writing) GPU in this system which, as we have seen, features plenty of gaming performance. As this is the 'Mech' variant, it features a twin-fan design and, with that huge radiator and solid airflow from the system, should perform even at the highest levels without any problems. RAM In terms of RAM, we can find 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4/3200mhz of HyperX Fury memory. This is a nice and solid choice by Cyberpower PC and with 3200MHz speeds offers some strong performance! Alas, this memory doesn't have any RGB features, but with all of the lighting on the inside (including that LED lighting strip), perhaps adding RAM into that equation would've been overkill to some of you. Power Supply The power supply to the Ultra 5 RX Pro features a Corsair Vengeance Series 650M 650W 80+ Silver. It is somewhat unusual to see an 80-Plus Silver power supply, but it's certainly a step-up from the usual bronze (or just standard 80-plus) models. With 650w of power, it has plenty of headroom for the components in this system and a few more (moderate ones) on top of those too! Storage Of the two storage drives offered in this system, starting with the more fancy one we can see an ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD. With 512GB of storage, this has plenty of capacity for the vast majority of your games and applications. If you need a little more space, then Cyberpower PC has you covered with a 2TB Seagate BarraCuda SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hard Drive. For a standard HDD, this is a great choice with both excellent capacity and speed selection. It really provides you with a nice and solid additional storage option. RGB Lighting The RGB lighting effects provided from those new fans are amazingly bright and powerful. With 6 internally, they punch out some excellent aesthetics and light up all of the internal components. With the (highly detailed) remote control allowing you to control these at your fingertips as well, you're almost certain to find a scheme that ticks the box of even the most ardent RGB hater. While it looks good with the side panel off, however, they do get exceptionally muted when that acrylic windowed panel is fitted. This is, however, only more notable in the solid darker colors (red/blue). The brighter selections, such as the 'rainbow' patterns, come through nicely. We do, however, wonder whether that tint was taken just a bit too far here to really allow those RGB lights to punch to their fullest potential. With the two exhaust fans to the top, you are again given more RGB glory. However, the dust protection covering does, again, mute it a little. When removed, however, you can see that these RGB fans are punching out a lot of light. The RGB does work a little better on the front as the plastic casing is nowhere near as thick as the windowed panel. That 'gap' for the bottom vent is, additionally, a nice visual touch to the overall colour scheme. LED Strip It would be entirely remiss of us to not highlight the RGB strip that Cyberpower PC has installed to the interior edge of this system. It has some amazing lighting effects that work in tandem with the fans and, in terms of presentation, really takes this system to another level. Overall Thoughts In terms of design and aesthetics, Cyberpower PC has really pushed the boat out with this system. Everything is fantastically tidy inside, cable management is excellent and it just presents itself as a well put together machine. Is there is a downside, however, it's the chassis. Not in its design, but the fact that the acrylic windowed panel to the side is (perhaps) a little too tinted to really let that RGB punch through. Light and bright colors do, however, work much better and are definitely your friends here! Testing & Methodology To test each system or notebook, we want to stress every component of the system to check stability and performance, giving us an idea as to why those particular components were picked for this particular system. We use a wide variety of applications to gain a broad spectrum of results for comparing diverse aspects of system performance. Games Used All games are tested at both 1920 x 1080, 2560 x 1440 and 3840 x 2160 (4K) (where supported). *Please note that for systems which do not support a particular resolution, such as 1080p laptops, we will not test the higher resolutions on those devices. In an attempt to bring our games more into line with modern releases and specifically those that offer Nvidia RTX/DLSS features, we have decided to update some of our games accordingly. Please note that not all games listed below may be used in our tests. Games and Settings Used Shadow of the Tomb Raider DX12 Medium Preset - Includes Separate RTX/DLSS Tests - Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p*Deus Ex: Mankind Divided DX12 Medium Preset - Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p*Rise of the Tomb Raider Medium Preset- Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p*Metro Exodus DX12 Medium Preset - Includes Separate RTX/DLSS Tests - Epic Games Link1080p1440p*2160p*Far Cry New Dawn Medium Preset - Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p* World of Tanks enCore Medium Preset - Official website1080p1440p2160pFinal Fantasy XV Windows Edition Medium Preset - Official Website1080p1440p*2160p*F1 2018 Medium Preset - Steam Link1080p1440p*2160p* Software Used 3DMark Fire Strike (download)FireStrike (1080p) BenchmarkUnigine Superposition (download)1080p Extreme BenchmarkPCMark 10 Professional (download)Express BenchmarkWPrime (download)32M and 1024MCineBench R15 (download)CPU MultiCPU SingleHandbrake (download)Custom MP4 to MKV 4K conversion (details below)AIDA64 Engineer (download)CPU-Z (download)HWMonitor (download) Handbrake To stress processors to their absolute limit and accurately judge their performance in video editing workloads, we transcode a 7.7GB compilation of gaming footage; this particular file is freely available from here. The captured footage is 22 minutes and 12 seconds long, it has a bit rate of 50.1 Mbps and it uses the Advanced Video Codec. Additionally, the video runs at a constant 30 frames-per-second and opts for a 3820 x 2140 (4K) resolution. Once loaded into Handbrake, we then transcode the 4K MP4 to an MKV file using the “normal” profile. 3DMark Firestrike There are some points we should highlight that will (largely) apply to most of the benchmarks that follow. The Ultra 5 RX Pro is not a super-high specification system. As is often the way with AMD, we're looking at an excellent performance on a wallet-friendly budget. In terms of what this system provides, however, it easily falls within the remit of a very decent upper-mid/lower-top tier gaming PC and starting off with the 3DMark Firestrike test. it gets off to a surprisingly good start. Recording a score of 21,129 this is very good indeed and already shows you that in terms of overall performance, this system has a lot under the hood! Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme The Unigine Superposition scores are, again, very high. Admittedly, the RX 5700 XT doesn't perform on the same level as the upper-tier Nvidia cards, but we already knew that, right? What it does do, however, is provide a highly respectable score of 5,053 that is well above the average seen for consumer-level systems at this price point. PCMark 10 PCMark 10 looks to test a processor for its overall multitasking ability and, as such, it comes as no surprise to see it very high on the list. Despite this system packing a relatively modest sounding Ryzen 3600 (when compared to the entire Ryzen range) it still manages to practically match the vast majority of some of the best consumer level Intel 8th and 9th-gen releases. WPrime 32m and 1024m Following up on the excellent processor performance, the WPrime test gives very similar (and much better than you might expect) results. Cracking the top 4 will (or at least should) raise more than a few eyebrows in pleasant surprise. Cinebench R15 Finding itself (again) in the top 4, the Cinebench R15 test adds what little confirmation you had left required that the Ryzen 3600 is an amazing workhorse of a processor. Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K With more and more people looking to put out video content online, the video rendering rate of a system has become increasingly important. In this regard, the Cyberpower Ultra 5 RX Pro system has you well covered with a 68.1fps conversion rate. This is truly excellent and, as you can see below, is very high in terms of systems we have tested in the past. If you're a regular content creator on sites such as YouTube, you're going to love this! Storage With a 512GB M.2 SSD and 2TB HDD, the Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro offers you plenty of storage space. In terms of speeds too, while they aren't the fastest we haven't seen, they're still more than a little impressive. While the SSD write speeds are lower than they should be, sometimes our tests do just throw up weird results. We can honestly say, however, that the true figure is probably a fair bit higher. Gaming Performance With a Ryzen 3600 processor, MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics card and 16GB of HyperX Fury RAM, on paper, this sounds like a great gaming system. One that is well balanced to provide high and consistent levels of performance. Well, as you might expect, our tests showed that this was entirely the case! Admittedly, the Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro does have some bad luck in that comparatively speaking, it's finding itself competing in many games with systems we would have to deem towards the HEDT end of the scale. We have, after all, only recently swapped out many of our gaming benchmarks for more modern (and relevant) titles. Even then, however, as you can clearly see, the Ultra 5 RX Pro gives an impressive accounting of itself and even manages to beat a number of those seemingly more powerful systems in more than just a couple of our tests. Particularly in the 1080p area where the vast majority of PC gamers happily reside! World of Tanks enCore Far Cry New Dawn F1 2018 Metro Exodus Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition Shadow of the Tomb Raider Acoustics & Temperatures Now, I can already see some of you thinking that given that this is a primarily AMD based system, noise and temperatures are going to be its Achilles heel, right? Well, in truth, while the system is a little noisier and warmer than we usually see from desktops, the results given are by no means bad either. It sounds exactly as noisy as any standard gaming PC would and remember, this one has six 120mm fans all working to keep that airflow nice, cool and strong! In addition, while the Corsair H45 is an excellent small profile cooler, it is a 120mm design. As such, expectations should be adjusted accordingly. Taking all this into consideration, the results are, at a casual glance, pretty standard. That, however, by no means makes them bad! CPU Temperatures GPU Temperatures Acoustics Price Cyperpower PC is currently retailing the Ultra 5 RX Pro Gaming PC for £1258.80 including VAT. So, is this good value? Well, that largely lies in the individual component costs and what you're getting in a system as a whole. Albeit, not including the RGB modifications that Cyberpower PC has made to this system, an (admittedly rough) parts price list shows this system to have a barebones value of around £1100. So, is this system good value? We say 100% yes. If we were to roughly equate the RGB fan modifications to this system as around £15 a fan (£15 x 6 = £90) and hub controller (£15) then this brings the total 'bare bones' value to at least over £1200. When you add in the 3-year warranty and the excellent build quality, the overheads are clearly very minimal and, as such, this system provides you with some excellent value for money here! Performance The AMD Ryzen 3600 processor and MSI Radeon 5700 XT Mech OC graphics card complement each other really well in this system. Yes, the performance figures are not off the charts, but these particular components are clearly not within those remits either. As you can see in our benchmark results, that processor has a surprisingly large amount of horsepower and when combined with the graphics card, provide some excellent (and dare I say, better than you might have thought?) gaming benchmark. What you have here is an excellent higher-mid/lower-top tier system that will easily eat up any work or play you throw its way. Design & Aesthetics Taken as a whole, the system has a really strong design backed up by some excellent RGB fans and an LED strip that Cyberpower PC has clearly taken a lot of pride in with this built. If there is a flaw, it's with that tinted acrylic side window. In my opinion, it's a bit too tinted to really let that amazing RGB really punch. Albeit, it's easily overcome with some of the more brighter and vivid color choices. RGB and lighting is always a matter of opinion, however. Some love it, some hate it and (many) others simply want a solid middle ground and this system definitely has enough going for it to fulfill any of those remits! Should I Buy One? I would honestly say, hand on heart, that if there is someone out there looking to get into the PC gaming world, then this system is about as perfect as it gets. The Cyberpower PC Ultra RX 5 Pro ticks all of the right boxes. It's a pre-built system, well-specced, reasonably priced, and one that carries more than a little eye-candy. What more could you ask for? Yes, I know AMD still has its detractors out there, but if you've been paying attention to the news, we're seeing more and more get swayed to Team Red and products such as the Ryzen Processor and AMD 5700 XT graphics cards are leading that charge! If you're looking for a solid and well-designed pre-built PC gaming system for a price that won't cost you a kidney, the Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro is pretty high, if not top, of my current recommendations! Pros Excellent system components give a surprisingly strong performanceStrong aesthetics thanks to the design and RGB lighting effectsExcellent built-quality is shown throughout this systemStrong enough to handle even the most demanding AAA-gaming releasesPlenty of processor power to handle those more demanding work tasks Cons None Neutral The tinted windowed panel (and even the front covering) somewhat limits that amazing RGB lighting Cyberpower PC has provided. Cyberpower PC Ultra 5 RX Pro Gaming PC Review