The Good:
Price: A little better than PCpartpicker components as of 8-29-2019, better if on sale
Parts: Reasonably good brands in my unit
Build: Good cable management
Performance: System is very powerful. Pushes many titles at 2K on high/ultra. Gsync/freesync work great!
Sound: Quiet system, even with fans on max.
The Bad:
No GPU drivers or utilities installed by default
Firmware update was required to get proper CPU speed boosts working
No extra cables or screws to add new drives
The Ugly:
Poor heat management out of the box, resulting in GPU throttling. *Edited 9-8-2019* I disabled my added fans and set the included fans to max (still pretty quiet!). GPU didn't get above 78C and didn't throttle. Therefore out of the box, it doesn't necessarily throttle, so I bumped it to 5 stars. I still recommend adding a couple $12 case fans (see below for details).
Out of the box, this is a 3 star unit. After a few cheap mods, it's a 5 star beast of a machine. Average of 4 stars. *See edit above, 5 star machine all around!*
When I first got the machine and started it up, I was impressed by how quiet it was. After installing Nvidia drivers since only GeForce Experience was installed by default, I fired up FurMark to stress test the GPU and check temps (using MSI Afterburner). The temps crept up to 84C, resulting in about a 10% throttle. Although the GPU fans were going crazy, the case fans were virtually silent. Removing the side panel dropped the GPU temp to 68C, so that ruled out the MSI cooler.
I happened to have some 120x25mm noctua NF-P12 redux case fans intended for an Alienware machine that never arrived, so I installed them in the two inexplicably empty fan slots in this case, one on the bottom and one on the top above the radiator. The bottom one went in easily, the top one required sliding the radiator down as far as possible in the oval mounting holes, and even then it was a very tight fit. As it's a 120/140 mm hole, I would recommend a good, quiet 140x15mm slim fan instead. I moved the radiator fan cable from the chassis header to the CPU fan header, and installed the new fans in the chassis 1 and 2 headers. The 4 LED fans are not connected to the mobo and so are not speed controllable.
There was a marked improvement in GPU temps, but they still crept up to ~78C over time and again, none of the case fans ever really spun up. So I installed Asus AI suite 3 from their website, and used Fan Xpert 4 to max out all fans, which was not really that loud, actually. Furmark maxed out the GPU at 70C, which was clearly a large improvement, but I still wanted automatic fan control. I did not try max fans with the default setup, so that might be worth trying before buying anything. One issue is that all of the fans only respond to the CPU temp by default, and HW monitor showed the CPU never got above 45C or above 4.1 GHZ. Some googling suggested a firmware upgrade, which fixed the boost issue. Unfortunately Fan Xpert 4 will not control the chassis fan speed from GPU temp (except with ASUS cards, annoyingly), so I chose the mobo temp header and built some acceptable temp/fans speed curves from that. I still max at about 74C while gaming unless I manually max the fans, so there's still some more tweaking to do and other fan control software out there. Honestly though, the default, normal mode is more than sufficient with the 2 extra fans.
In the end, I use this with a 2k 144 hx 32 inch freesync LG monitor and it screams. This machine definitely hits a nice price/performance sweet spot, once a couple fans are added.
Since there's little detail on components in the description, here's what came in my box (YMMV):
GPU: MSI Ventus RTX 2070 OC
Mobo: Asus PRIME Z390-P
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 2400 with heat spreader
PSU: Apevia Prestige 80+ gold (probably 600 watt, not obvious and I didn't remove the unit to find out)
Wifi: AsRock AC
Mouse and keyboard: cyberpowerPC branded LED. Membrane keys. Seem reasonable quality.
| Standing screen display size | 1 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 2400 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Card Description | Dedicated |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 8 GB |
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
| Number of USB 2.0 Ports | 2 |
| Number of USB 3.0 Ports | 6 |
