iBUYPOWER Erebus GT Gaming System Review

Performance Summary: The Erebus GT is an extremely powerful gaming system. It blasted through all of our standard benchmarks and, more importantly, rocked our gaming tests. iBUYPOWER clearly did a nice job of choosing components, as the SSD/HDD combo and Radeon 7970 graphics card showed their strength in the tests that pushed them.

Even when pitted against systems far beyond its price range, the Erebus GT for the most part held its own, and you really can’t ask any more than that from a system. Similar (or better) performance for, in some cases, half the cash or less? Yes, please.

The issue we had with the vanishing overclock settings was somewhat troubling. We understand that things just happen sometimes, and even a minor hiccup along the way can result in what we experienced, so we won’t be too hard on iBUYPOWER for it, even though it bears mentioning.

Aside from that, there just isn’t much to complain about here. The Erebus GT is a blazing fast system wrapped in a tastefully understated and high-quality chassis, and the components inside enjoy a beautiful water cooling setup. Every stitch of the system’s impressive performance is covered by your warranty, so you get to enjoy overclocked CPU performance without that nagging worry that you’ll damage anything and have to pay for it.

Although at $2,499 the Erebus GT costs more than many average mainstreamer users are going to be willing to spend, we can see in the benchmarks that some lower-cost custom builds can’t (or can barely) hack it when push comes to shove in games. What the Erebus GT offers is a clear cut above those budget systems, delivering more than enough FPS to handle any game at essentially any resolution. It’s also adept at any number of intensive computing applications, and it can more or less keep pace with tricked-out custom systems that come in at a much higher price point. As we mentioned at the beginning of this piece, that’s pretty much the definition of a sweet spot.

What iBUYPOWER is proving here is that it pays to be smart about where you incur costs in a system. They could have put a second graphics card in there, but a lot of that extra performance isn't perceived without running benchmarks and it would adds significant cost to the system; the same logic applies to a pricier SSD. A sexy paint job would have been cool too, but that’s a lot of dough for something that doesn’t add one iota of performance.

If you don’t want to break the bank on a killer custom system, you may want to pass on the Erebus GT (or just choose a lower-spec’d configuration that fits your budget), but if it’s the high-end, custom gaming rig experience you want, the Erebus GT is a good value.

To put it in colloquial terms: The cheese stands alone. Considering the excellent performance demonstrated by our system, build quality, and price, we’re glad to recommend the iBUYPOWER Erebus GT.