CyberPower Gamer Ultra 2098 Budget Gaming PC Review

Internal Impressions

Opening up the CyberPower Gamer Ultra 2098 side panel was easy thanks to the panel being held on by a pair of thumbscrews. With the door removed we are face-to-face with a very clean looking interior with impressive cable management. Properly routing the cables not only looks nice, but it will also improve
airflow throughout the case. The case looks huge, but keep in mind that CyberPower used a Micro ATX motherboard for this system build.

Removing the right side panel we found that the wiring was nicely routed and bundled together, despite having hardly any room behind the motherboard tray. The Azza Orion has a CPU cutout in the motherboard tray, but as you can see it doesn’t exactly lineup with the AMD motherboard being used here. Not a big deal, but something worth noting.

CyberPower went with the Gigabyte GA-M68MT-S2 Revision 3.1 motherboard for the Gamer Ultra 2098 PC. This motherboard choice is a little strange, but we’ll have to see how it performs before we pass judgment on it. The AMD FX-4100 processor is kept cool by the AMD retail boxed CPU cooler. The video card is a Gigabyte branded AMD Radeon HD 6670 1GB DDR3. The 8GB DDR3 memory consists of 2 x 4GB ADATA 1333MHz memory modules that run with 9-9-9-24 timings. We found that the plastic fan shroud on the video card blocks the top two SATA II ports. The easiest way to fix this is to take the video card out and cut out a section of the fan shroud as it doesn’t really do much for airflow direction. This will likely void the warranty on the video card though.

The system is powered by a 500 Watt Turbolink branded switching power supply with model number ATX-TL500W-BK. This is a brand that we haven’t heard of before. It has two +12V rails with +12v1 being rated at 16 Amps and +12v2 being rated at 18 Amps. This power supply doesn’t have any PCIe 6-pin power connectors for video card expansion, which is a bit of a bummer as we always like PCs to have an upgrade path. We took a look around the system and found all the power connectors were used except for one 4-pin molex connector and a SATA power connector.

The hard drive cage is located right behind the 80mm LED fan on the front of the case, which is nice as it has some airflow around it. You want to keep your hard drive as cool as possible as heat is your enemy on critical components like your storage drive. CyberPower went with a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue hard drive with part number WD5000AAKX. This drive features the latest SATA III 6Gbps interface with a 7200 RPM spindle speed and 16MB of cache. This drive offers rock-solid performance and is ideal for family and business computing. We did find it strange that CyberPower included a SATA III 6Gbps drive on a system that has a motherboard that only has four SATA II 3Gbps ports. If you need to add additional storage there are spots for two more 3.5″ hard drives and one 2.5″ SSD.