CyberPower Gamer Ultra 2098 Budget Gaming PC Review

The CyberPower Gamer Ultra 2098

Over the past several years the average selling price of a PC has been declining and you can get a pretty good deal for what you spend these days. CyberPower recently reached out to Legit Reviews and wanted us to look at a budget gaming PC before the upcoming holiday season. We don’t review too many full systems on the site, but every so often we like to see what companies like CyberPower are offering consumers. CyberPower considers a budget gaming PC to be right around $600, so we told them to send us a system and we will put it through the paces.

The PC that showed up at our door step a couple months later was the CyberPower Gamer Ultra 2098. We are actually excited to get this PC as it uses the new AMD FX-4100 3.6GHz quad-core ‘Bulldozer’ processor along with the Gigabyte Radeon HD 6670 1GB video card and 8GB of DDR3 memory. It should be a fairly robust budget gaming PC that has an MSRP of $609.00. As you know, the street price is always usually lower than the MSRP and this situation is no different with Newegg carrying this model for $574.98 ($559.99 plus $14.99 shipping).

Gamer Ultra 2098 Features:

• AMD FX-4100 3.6GHz Quad-Core CPU
• Gigabyte M68MT-S2 Motherboard
• 8GB DDR3 1333 (2 x 4GB) Memory w/ CL9 Timings
• 500GB SATA III 6.0Gb/s 7200RPM Hard Drive
• 24x DVDR/RW Dual Layer Optical Drive
• AMD 6670 1GB DDR3 PCI-e Video Card
• 500 Watt Power Supply
• AZZA Orion PC Case (Black / Red)
• Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit
• Xtreme Gear USB Keyboard & Mouse

As you can see, you get some pretty good hardware and at $575 shipped it will be tough to configure an identical system on your own for much cheaper. We headed to Newegg to see what we could build up on our own and came up with this:

• AMD FX-4100 Zambezi 3.6GHz Processor – $129.99 Shipped
• Gigabyte M68MT-S2 Motherboard – $54.99 plus $6.98 Shipping
• 2 x 4GB ADATA DDR3 1333MHz Memory – $44.99 Shipped
• AMD Radeon HD 6670 Video Card – $79.99 plus $6.98 Shipping
• Azza Orion 202 – $39.99 plus $13.28 Shipping (after mail-in rebate)
• Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKX 500GB – $109.99 plus $7.28 Shipping
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit – $99.99 Shipped
• LITE-ON 24X DVD Writer HS124 – $19.99 plus $0.99 Shipping
• Turbolink 500W ATX Power Supply – $21.99 plus $5.99 for an equivalent
• Xtreme Gear USB Keyboard – $6.99 plus $6.98 for an equivalent
• Xtreme Gear USB Mouse – $5.49 shipped for an equivalent

After spending some time on Newegg and finding all the exact pieces this PC uses with the exception of the power supply and keyboard/mouse we came up with $662.87 and that is also having to deal with a rebate on the case. So, by buying a system from CyberPower you actually save money and don’t have to mess with assembling it, installing Windows 7 and all the proper system drivers! Years ago it was always cheaper to build your own system, but as you can see here, it isn’t anymore. CyberPower builds thousands of these systems and sells them at retailers like Wal-Mart and Newegg, so they get volume discounts that are not available to you or us! Having CyberPower do all the work for nearly a hundred dollars less than what we can buy the parts for sounds like an easy call to make.

Since CyberPower released this PC in October 2011 just before the holiday season we wouldn’t be too surprised if it goes for even lower than this when Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales start later this month. Nearly everything has a sale price and this PC just came out a week ago, so it will be interesting to see what happens to the price down the road.

Let’s take a look at the Gamer Ultra 2098 system that CyberPower sent us to review!