26Oct My CyberpowerPC Experience Part 3
After the grand unpacking of the system (see the review part 2 HERE), I was very excited to power on the rig and see how the box performed! I attached a keyboard and monitor, watched the POST screen flash (with me rubbing my hands in rapt anticipation), waiting for this beast to jump into Windows Vista! Then, suddenly a flash and a screen appeared….”No Operating System Found”! I was thinking, “You have got to be kidding me”.
It is an ASUS motherboard and I had lots of little issues with my old ASUS. I rebooted and jumped into the BIOS configuration, hmmmm RAID is turned off on the SATA controller. Since I ordered the box with RAID-0, either CyberpowerPC never configured anything, or the BIOS got messed up.
I turned the RAID controller on and enabled RAID for the two SATA drives that were factory installed. As I held my breath, I rebooted the system and waited. Joy of joy, the system LEAPED into the Windows Vista 64 boot screen! Amazing!
However, the issues continued to occur like a rainstorm. Just a list of things that happened:
- The system failed to boot (Never finished the POST) 60% of the time
- The system hung frequently during patch installation
- The system Blue Screen of Death’d (BSOD) several times for no apparent reason
- The system locked up installing updates to NVidia graphics and chipset software
- Generally things sucked!
I turned to the best tech support group I know of: Google! I followed the trail of lock-ups, first and foremost, the 60% boot failure: Google revealed that my OCZ 1600MHZ Gold memory had some serious stability issues with the ASUS Striker II Extreme. I updated the BIOS to reflect OCZ’s recommend memory timings (8-8-8-24), that seemed to work and allowed me to boot most of the time, but I still was having some crazy issues booting up.(even going into the BIOS)
My next step was to check the BIOS level on the mobo, it was at version 0804, which was several major revisions back. I downloaded BIOS version 1104 from ASUS and attempted to install, however, the front USB ports do not appear to be functional I played with the US issue or awhile, finally determining that only two of the four front USB ports were working.
After more work than it should have take, BIOS 1104 was installed. After a lot more testing, version 1104 appears to have really stabilized the system, eliminating a large percentage of the lockups.
Together the memory timing fix and the updated BIOS resolved about 95% of my issues. However, I still experienced occasional lockups (Playing Team Fortress 2), but it was hard to diagnose when and why. Finally, I decided the system was stable enough to try downloading Crysis from Steam see how that looked. Crysis locked up EVERY TIME I tried to run it (It made it past all of the cut scenes, then locked hard before the “airplane” scene). This was a good thing, as I went back to technical support (Google) for this issue and I found several recommendations for different versions of NVidia’s Geforce drivers. I downloaded an older version of the Geforce drivers and installed it (version 178.13). This appears to have solved the problem. As of this witting, I have had not lockups in 24 hours and the system has been VERY stable in Crysis and TF2 (and anything else).
Here is a picture of the rig up and running:
Finally up and running
Here is my (nearly) final review.
Most of the issues I had were not actually related to CyberpowerPC, and I did customize my rig from their recommended build. With that said, there clearly was no configuration or burn-in testing done of the rig or it would have failed. The price was great, the build was very good. I never dreamed of calling technical support, but in fairness, if this would have been a Dell, I would not have called either.
On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being best:
- Price: 10 (This things was a lot cheaper than I could have built it)
- Build: 8 (It was nice, but it was not Dell build)
- Stability: 1 (Clearly it did not work well out of the box)
- Performance: 8 (After all of the fixes were done)
- Sales Support: 9 (Actually, my two calls were answer quickly and to my satisfaction)
- Tech Support: NA (Most tech support sucks though)
- Over All Ted Scale: Errmmm, I am going to say 7.5
It would have been in the high 8’s, but man the system did not even boot on my first power on!
Notes: If you are good with computers and understand how they work, this might be a good way to go for you. If you want to buy a computer the “just runs”, this is so not the purchase for you. I looked at this product as a cheap way to build a high-end rig, without the bloody knuckles! I did a lot of work, sure, but I saved $1,700 over a similarly equipped Dell, I can afford 15-20 hours of my time to save that kind of money.
Other miscellaneous observations:
- Windows Vista 64 is pretty darn good if you have a rig big enough to run it.
- Quad SLI kicks butt!
- The Cosmos S case is absolutely beautiful!
- I continue to dislike ASUS motherboards.