CyberPower Gamer Ultra 7500SE

Budget gaming system offers midrange performance and plenty of expansion room, but its mediocre design lessens its appeal.

Priced at $999 (as of July 14, 2006), the Gamer Ultra 7500SE is a budget system whose average performance should suffice.

With an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ processor and 1GB of RAM, the Gamer Ultra 7500SE achieved a WorldBench 5 score of 98--just above the average score earned by our current field of value systems, but 16 percent below the mark of 117 registered by our current top-scoring value PC, Velocity Micro's Vector GX.

The 7500E's gaming performance was a bit better. The system, which includes an eVGA e-GeForce 7600GS graphics card with 256MB of RAM, notched a frame rate of 128 frames per second in Return to Castle Wolfenstein at a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. That's the third-highest score a value system has recorded on this test.

At first glance, you might surmise that the Gamer Ultra 7500SE's large case takes its cues from gamer chic, since a number of blue LEDs illuminate its plastic, curved front. But on closer examination the case is less appealing. The front looks and feels cheaply made and fragile; and though the large side window gives a good view of the system's innards--illuminated by the cool blue glow of a cathode light at the bottom of the system and by LEDs on the fan--the effect is spoiled by poorly routed cabling, including an awkwardly dangling power connector. The cabling is tied back, at least, but if you want to add a new hard drive or optical drive, you'll have to cut the cable ties to free up a power connector.

The system has plenty of open bays for adding extra hard drives: four internal 3.5-inch drive bays and two externally accessible 5.25-inch drive bays (a 16X multiformat DVD burner and a 16X DVD-ROM drive occupy two other externally accessible drive bays). A five-in-one media card reader fills one external 3.25-inch external drive bay, as well. The system runs Windows XP Media Center Edition, but CyberPower did not include a TV tuner or a remote control with our review unit (you can buy them together as a $99 option).

The 19-inch ViewSonic Optiquest Q9B LCD monitor included with our test system rendered our test images, games, and DVDs with dark and dull colors. Another shortcoming: The LCD provides only a VGA input, which yields fuzzier video than would the DVI connection that the system's graphics card offers.

The company backs this system with a three-year parts-and-labor warranty that includes 24-hour daily tech support. Unfortunately, CyberPower scored poorly in our most recent reliability and service survey .

The Gamer Ultra 7500SE is a budget system enclosed in a cheap case. But if you don't mind losing the corners that CyberPower cut to keep costs down, this model may be worth considering.