CyberPowerPC Zeus Thunder 2500 SE Gaming PC Review

Metro 2033 DX11 Gaming Performance

Metro 2033 is your basic post-apocalyptic first person shooter game with a few rather unconventional twists. Unlike most FPS titles, there is no health meter to measure your level of ailment, but rather you’re left to deal with life, or lack there-of more akin to the real world with blood spatter on your visor and your heart rate and respiration level as indicators. The game is loosely based on a novel by Russian Author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Metro 2003 boasts some of the best 3D visuals on the PC platform currently including a DX11 rendering mode that makes use of advanced depth of field effects and character model tessellation for increased realism.


Remember a couple of pages ago when we said we’d bring up the whole Maingear SHIFT SS X79 thing when there was something to discuss? That time is now.

The CyberPowerPC hit 117.63 FPS at a resolution of 1024x768, which bested the Maingear’s score of 83 FPS by a ridiculous margin. Then again, at 1920x1080, the CyberPowerPC rig pulled just 57.33 FPS while the Maingear and Digital Storm systems hit 73.67 FPS and 71.53 FPS, respectively.

It appears as though performance with single GeForce cards is scaling much differently than multi-card Radeon HD setups in Metro 2033. Note the Dell Alienware (with a GeForce GTX 555) scores we included; the curve there is similar to that of the CyberPowerPC system. The two Radeon HD-packing systems barely post performance differences between resolutions at all--not that it’s a problem to deliver upwards of 70 FPS at any resolution.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Call of Pripyat DX11 Gaming Performance

Call of Pripyat is the third game in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series and throws in DX11 to the mix. This benchmark is based on one of the locations found within the latest game. Testing includes four stages and utilizes various weather conditions, as well as different time of day settings. It offers a number of presets and options, including multiple versions of DirectX, resolutions, antialiasing, etc. SunShafts represents the most graphically challenging stage available. We conducted our testing with DX11 enabled, multiple resolutions, and Ultra settings.

Batman: Arkham City DirectX Gaming Performance

Batman: Arkham City is a sequel to 2009’s Game of the Year winning Batman: Arkham Asylum. This recently released sequel, however, lives up to and even surpasses the original. The story takes place 18 months after the original game. Quincy Sharp, the onetime administrator of Arkham Asylum, has become mayor and convinced Gotham to create "Arkham City" by walling off the worst, most crime-ridden areas of the city and turning the area into a giant open-air prison. The game has DirectX 9 and 11 rendering paths, with support for tessellation, multi-view soft shadows, and ambient occlusion. We tested in DX11 mode with all in-game graphical options set to their maximum values, at various resolutions.


We’ve noted in the past that Batman: Arkham City struggles with CrossFire setups, and when we tested the Maingear rig, it was a downright mess, which led to that system’s comparatively dismal scores. Software updates in the meantime have helped, which is why Digital Storm is our highest scorer in this test and why the CyberPowerPC system did as well as it did against both of the other systems.

The benefit of a multi-GPU setup is more apparent the higher the resolution goes, as the performance gap between the Digital Storm and CyberPowerPC systems widens at each increase.