Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll start by saying I have over 35 years of IT experience, specifically DIY PC's, gaming rigs and servers. It's because of my love for gaming that I naturally gravitated to a professional career. So because of the significance of cost vs value I felt I needed to share this so others with perhaps less experience will be aware of what they're about to buy. Now that said, I'm older now and don't have the time or energy to build and tweak like I used to. I decided to buy ,for the first time, a prebuild specific to VR gaming. After pricing all the parts starting with CPU then GPU then memory/storage and finally motherboard, I felt that a rig outfitted with all the latest hardware and tech would run about $1600. While looking I saw the back to school special advertising this VR ready prebuild touting all the great reviews and coming in a couple hundred below my estimate I thought "why not, I'll be able to plug and play in a day vice a week or two". Now they don't CYBERPOWERPC doesn't list what brand equipment they install just the tech specs, one can even infer from the description that it's too of the line and tuned for performance, it must be if they supply rigs to championship tournaments right! NOPE! So here's what I got: Case: standard tower as described, but without any chassis lighting which is discrepancy 1. Nowadays lighting goes hand in hand with build specs so yeah it's a big deal. The keyboard and mouse are nothing special, the mouse does light up with random colors but material quality is cheap and feels like it might last no more than a year with regular use. Unboxing was standard with solid formed styrofoam. One little bag with a few parts and manuals was all it came with and at first I didn't think much of it, until I looked inside. The case, in my opinion is the absolute worst case to build the 'ultimate VR ready game rig' in. it has on the left a tempered glass cover with another on the front. Again no chassis lights and no expansion slots. This really started to annoy me, two USB ports, power and reset at the top. That's it. Inside is very open, most cabling is hidden, which is good, until you open the right panel to see how. What lights up are the fans and CPU cooler, but you'll quickly find that they are completely random and not controlled. They are ARGB but wired straight to power with a randomizer inline. The board is the ASUS PRIME Z390-P, though a solid board it definitely NOT an optimal gaming optimized motherboard. I was shocked to find that. The processor is what's advertised, the video card is the MSI GTX2070 super, Ventura, not the gaming series with RGB lighting and triple fan cooling, nope the cheapest 2070 currently in production. Memory consist of two xpg ddr4 3000 8x2 - decent. SSD storage is an Intel 660p 1tb NVM with no heatsink. Again surprised by the choice given the description. OS is win10 home with no modifications or performance tweaks, in fact none of the OEM software was installed. Think fresh install of windows and stop. Now this was the most surprising because again this is supposed to be a VR, ultra high gaming rig suited to championship tournaments but it's more like a kids first try at diy building. Now given that all the parts are market with nothing proprietary to CYBERPOWERPC, I expected all the additional parts and pieces would be included, like they would be had I purchased them individually, but nope again. Book, driver CD for Mobo, a couple of quick setup papers for the GPU and CYBERPOWERPC warranty card. A closer look at the assembly shows that this was put together in a hurry, most of the screws were loose, not securely screwed in. This I noticed when I turned it on and heard vibration coming from the fans, same with Mobo it had play because screws weren't all tight. Cabling was what the picture shows and shoved into the bottom cavity, and zip tied in bunches. The fans are not variable speed, but are ARGB capable but instead of using that feature they were Daisy chained, not even plugged into Mobo fan ports so software doesn't think there are fans installed. The picture shows an RGB strip, that's mine, I plugged it in to the board to see if it would control it, the software that's supposed to do that will not run so they just change color randomly. Overall the build quality is sub-par and certainly doesn't represent a performance gaming machine. Something as simple as cable management is rushed and the total lack of performance customization coupled with less than optimal part selection really makes me pause and offer caution if you're in the market for a high-end gaming PC. And one more example of poor build quality is the alignment of the Mobo at the back. As the picture shows the ports are not aligned, so all of the bottom ports are obstructed and the only way to fix that is to disassemble everything and remount properly, but not ready to do that. I haven't decided if I'm sending it back, although I'm leaning toward yes at the moment.. $1500 is a lot of money especially when building something that's future proof (as future proof as a PC can be), and I would expect something like an alienware which is customized and tweaked for performance, in fact, I might just order one once this gets returned. Update 7 September: I have the overall review an additional star for a total of 4/5. Reason is the value when compared to NZXT which offers the exact build (including the built-in addressable RGB, Mobo is better being the MSI MPG Z390 Pro Carbon selected at the time of estimate +$179.00) for an additional$1000. Can't say if theirs is performance tweaked or what else comes with it, but given that significant savings I cannot in good consionce give it a lower rating. Performance is solid, it's incapable of bad performance because of the latest components used. I was able to run AutoCAD, compress video, run Elite Dangerous in VR AND Star Citizen at the same time with little to no lag that was noticable. For first time users: be sure to make a system / recovery image and disk in addition to linking to your Microsoft account in order to backup your activation key. Do this immediately after running live update and activation. Reason is, like most OEM PCs, there is no sticker or recovery media aside from the driver disk sent with the motherboard. If not you will not be able to recover/reload/upgrade this machine AND have a activated software license should there be hardware failure or significant hardware change (like motherboard).