Question CyberpowerPC...a quick review

punkncat

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A buddy of mine brought over his CyberpowerPC custom build yesterday to help diagnose an issue with the GPU. It appears it is dead and he will have to wade through what is a notoriously bad support process by many accounts and telling.

I have seen some of the builds they did a few years back and they were notorious for using really BAD parts, no name, no idea what all of it was or where it came from. CPC really stepped up the quality of components they are utilizing for their custom 'Gaming PC' selection. Almost everything inside was solid middle range or better as far as make, the cable management was quite good. The only wonky things I noted were that they rushed dropping in the motherboard and blocked two USB ports with the backplane tabs. The other was that they daisy chained all four fans off the case fan header and changed a setting in BIOS so it wouldn't throw a warning. When the BIOS got reset while troubleshooting it threw an error and for future ease I just moved the fan connector to the CPU header.

As far as pricing is concerned, when tabulating all the individual parts at an MSRP that is (mostly) meaningless, the build price was only a touch over $300. In the current market you could not have built it and reliably sourced the 3000 series GPU inside, for the cost. I would have a hard time recommending buying one, still, but am happy to say that they are paying attention to feedback and improving their product steadily. Lets hope customer service is moving that direction as well.
 

punkncat

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you would think since they build so many, they would know how to plug in the fans

You aren't kidding.
The unit came with a Cooler Master AIO with a push/pull fan on the radiator. Three of the four were LED, so they ran all of it into the back/basement of the Phanteks case, daisy chained them, and ran the connector back to the case fan header, which was located directly next to the pump header, and hidden by the radiator.
The aspect that was funny to me about that was the connector from the AIO was just long enough to tuck out the CPU power "hole" in the case and route behind to the "hole" that was just behind the CPU header.
Ultimately, if he keeps the machine I am going to help him remove the case fans from the daisy chain and put them on the case header again. They had everything taped up as far as the fan and LED connectors and that (along with the tabs on the backplane) are going to have to wait until it's assuredly his.

Where I am not super hopeful that CPC is even going to be able to make this right, I suggested that he might have a better time trying to RMA the GPU through Zotac directly.