iBuypower Revolt 2 Review: A Powerful, Portable Gaming Desktop

Name: IBuypower Revolt 2
Brand: IBuypower

by Joshua Gulick — Thursday, June 16, 2016, 12:50 PM EDT

Gaming is the Revolt 2’s reason for being, but we put it through a couple standard tests first to see how it stacks up in terms of general performance.

Futuremark PCMark 8

Simulated Application Performance

PCMark 8 simulates the workloads computers face in several different settings, including home and office use. The benchmark also has a test that simulates a creative professional’s usage, as well as battery and storage tests. We ran the tests with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage the power of the CPU and GPU.

The Revolt handled PCMark 8 with ease, posting the best scores we’ve seen from similar systems. It towered over the similarly-configured Digital Storm Bolt 3 in this test, but that system had a rough time with PCMark 8. We expected the two systems to be close competitors in the following tests.

Cinebench R11.5

Content Creation Performance

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software, this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We run the Main Processor Performance (CPU) test, which builds a still scene containing about 2,000 objects, for a total polygon count above 300,000.

The Revolt 2 ended up near the middle of the pack in this test. Its single-threaded score was strong thanks to the 6700K's relatively high clocks, but it couldn't keep up with the higher-end CPUs with more cores.

Tags: IBuyPower, LAN party, Revolt, Skylake, core-i7, gtx 980 ti

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.