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Price Analysis And Conclusion
CyberpowerPC threw us a curve ball with its X99-equipped Syber M Xtreme 400, particularly because our primary focus has been on Z170 desktops thus far. The advantages of the Syber M's six-core processor stand out in our benchmark results, but average users will find that if they aren't running CPU-intensive games and applications, an i7-6700K-equipped system will often fare marginally better with it's higher clock rate. However, the factory-overclocked EVGA GTX 1080 SC graphics card gives us notable increases in performance in GPU-intensive workloads, and although these wins are mostly by negligible differences, CyberpowerPC offers us our first look at what a factory-overclocked GPU can do against reference-clocked cards (the rest of the systems we've tested) in a variety of benchmarks.
We were somewhat disappointed at the overclock settings used in the Syber M. Although the base clock of the i7-6800K was increased by 400MHz (the same amount as Digital Storm's i7-6700K-equipped Vanquish 5), it will only achieve this clock rate in single and dual-threaded workloads, with the CPU clocked only 100MHz higher than the 3.4GHz base clock (3.5 GHz) when it engages more than two processing cores. We feel an all-core overclock could have further cemented the performance gains we saw in multi-threaded benchmarks, and given a more-compelling example of its potential to users actually looking for that kind of performance. However, it's among one of the least expensive overclock services we've seen lately, and you definitely get a modest boost in clock rate compared to the base frequency, despite it being only for a couple of the six cores.
The X99 chipset is rich with features, which includes a quad-channel memory controller, 10 SATA 6 Gb/s ports, stainless steel-reinforced PCIe x16 slots, and multi-GPU support. CyberpowerPC took advantage of the robust Gigabyte X99P-SLI motherboard by loading the Ultra M.2 slot with an NVMe SSD. However, we weren't particularly impressed with the 512GB Intel 600p's performance, but because it offers higher-than-SATA sequential performance and keeps the price-per-gigabyte of the SSD down, we can forgive the less-than-stellar benchmark results. Looking at the price, we can't be disappointed with the capacity and speed of the Syber M's primary storage, and 2TB of HDD storage is plenty of room to store a sizeable game library.
We were impressed with the custom-designed Syber M chassis, which gives the system a unique look compared to the sea of "me-too" cases many vendors use to build their custom PCs. It can accommodate more than what our sample was configured with (think custom water loops), and there are plenty of spots to throw extra storage drives. The PSU shroud is a great bonus, and similar to the front 3.5" bay door, it glows orange and gives the Syber M a definitive "wow" factor by hiding all the excess cable and illuminating the left side panel window.
At $2,208, the CyberpowerPC Syber M Xtreme 400 is exactly $100 cheaper than AVADirect's Z170 offering. The Avatar's price is affected by LED lighting (with remote) and its $25 overclocking service, which could be considered a balance of performance and aesthetic value. However, the Syber M puts aesthetics in the back seat to performance, with fan upgrades (non-LED, although they do come with colored rims) totaling $63 and a modest overclock for $19. Forgoing these extras, you still get an X99 platform with an Intel Core i7-6800K (cooled by a 240mm liquid-cooling radiator), 16GB of quad-channel DDR4-3000, an EVGA GTX 1080 SC graphics card, and a 512GB NVMe SSD in an accessible, custom-designed chassis for less than $2,150 ($2,126 to be exact), and we think that's fairly reasonable (and impressive).
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