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We don’t usually expect lightning-fast games performance from budget computers. We were therefore pleasantly surprised by CyberPower’s Ultra Athena. This PC has a 512MB ATI Radeon 4850 graphics card, which managed a staggering 54.5fps in our Call of Duty 4 test. That means you should be able to play any game smoothly on this computer. At this price games performance has to come at a cost, and it’s the processor that’s been compromised. Instead of using a Core 2 Quad or Phenom X4, CyberPower has used the budget 2.6GHz Athlon II X4 620. Like its competitors it has four cores, but it has less L2 cache than Intel’s Core 2 Quad processors and it doesn’t have any L3 cache. It therefore fell behind in most of our Windows benchmarks, although its overall score of 83 is still good. The Athena is quieter than other quad-core PCs we’ve seen thanks to its foam-lined case. This helps reduce noise by absorbing vibrations from moving, rattling components. Internally, there are six 3?in drive bays and three 5?in bays, but only a single SATA port. You can therefore connect only one more internal storage device to the motherboard before having to add a SATA PCI card. Considering the PSU has only one spare Molex connector, adding any extra peripherals will probably require a new power supply, too. Strangely, there’s no Gigabit Ethernet port, just 10/100Mbit/s networking. This isn’t a major problem if you’re not running a Gigabit Ethernet network, but we’d expect to see this feature on all modern PCs. We weren’t expecting budget PCs at this price to have warranties longer than a year, but the Ultra Athena has a surprisingly lengthy three-year warranty, although it is return-to-base so you’ll have to pay shipping costs.
CyberPower’s Ultra Athena is a great-value budget gaming PC. Its restrictive motherboard and budget processor are slight drawbacks. However, it still wins a Best Buy award.
