Pros & Cons
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- Impressive price-to-performance ratio
- Solid value for the component mix
- Sleek glass design
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- Fans can get loud
- Power supply wattage may limit future upgrades
- Side glass panel is tricky to seat
CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme (GXI2000CSTV3) Specs
| Boot Drive Capacity (as Tested) | 2 |
| Boot Drive Type | SSD |
| Desktop Class | Gaming |
| Graphics Card | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 |
| Operating System | Windows 11 Home |
| Processor | Intel Core Ultra 5 225F |
| Processor Speed | 3.3 |
| RAM (as Tested) | 32 |
The name "Gamer Xtreme" from CyberPowerPC probably may not evoke images of a budget-priced gaming desktop, but here we are. (With names like "BattleBox" and "Syber" already taken, maybe it ran out of options.) Whatever you call it, though, it's a winner: The Costco-exclusive $1,099.99 CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme (GXi2000CSTV3) gaming rig we tested looks just as pretty as a premium desktop for a lot less. This glass-covered, RGB-lit tower features an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 GPU that packs a punch, and its Intel Core Ultra 5 225F CPU is no slouch in its class. It's not perfect; the power supply has minimal wattage headroom, which may limit future graphics card upgrades, and the fans can get rowdy under load. Regardless, the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme is a stacked, affordable gaming desktop for first-time PC gamers or veteran players seeking peak value. It earns our Editors' Choice award for budget gaming desktops—for as long as the price holds. It's a great deal, given 2026's skyrocketing RAM and SSD costs.
Configurations: Made for Cash-Challenged Gamers
The CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme comes in a truly byzantine number of configurations, as expected from a custom PC-building brand. Our GXi2000CSTV3 review configuration is exclusive to Costco. It costs $1,099.99 (and was even seen as low as $849.99 during my review period) for an Intel Core Ultra 5 225F processor, an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5060 (8GB) graphics card, 32GB of 6,400MHz DDR5 memory, and a 2TB solid-state drive.
While the CPU could be more substantial at this price, everything else about this configuration is a step above the norm for the money. On CyberPowerPC’s website, you can upgrade everything from the processor to the graphics card, but it’ll cost you hundreds of dollars. I would stick to the Costco loadout if you’re looking for the maximum-value model.
Design: Living in a Glass House
Unboxing the Gamer Xtreme, I didn’t expect any budget gaming PC to look this sharp. The Xtreme leans into a fish-tank aesthetic. A significant portion of the case is made of glass, and another portion is transparent in its own way, due to the vents. When the yellow and blue RGB lights kicked on, I felt like Adam West's Bruce Wayne getting a new Batcomputer. (If you don't like the color scheme, don’t worry; you can change the RGB behavior with buttons on the top panel.)
The Xtreme's chassis measures 17.7 by 8.6 by 19.9 inches (HWD), making it the largest PC among the systems we benchmarked it against below. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when you’re inside tinkering, but it does mean you’ll need a bit more space on or under your desk than the other systems tested here take up.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)One frustrating aspect of the design is that the left side's glass panel can be tricky to reattach. The panel takes more effort than it should to slot in because it relies on small, short pegs that slide into holes in the case's frame.
Even when I thought I'd finally got the hang of it, I'd find a gap in the glass; if the bottom pegs are misaligned, the glass protrudes from the case (see the image below), leaving a small air gap instead of sitting flush with the frame. Despite this unintuitive mechanism, the interior is spacious, and the wires are neatly packed, resulting in a clean look.
(Credit: Rami Tabari)CyberPower includes a magnetic filter cover for the top cooling vents; it's easily removable for cleaning. This can help decrease dust buildup at the cost of a slight reduction in airflow. Unfortunately, the Wi-Fi 6 antenna that comes with the Xtreme is not magnetic, so it’s just a flimsy piece of plastic that sits on top of the PC. You may need to get a Velcro dot or other adhesive to position it where you want it to stay.
Connectivity and Upgrades: Lots of Ports, and a Just-Enough Power Supply
You'll find a series of ports located on the top panel, including two USB Type-A 3.1 ports, one USB Type-C 3.2 Gen 2 connection, and a headphone jack. This allows you to connect essential peripherals and device chargers you need easy access to. Of course, you also have the power button, and three additional buttons join it: two for the RGB lighting, and one for a hard restart.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)On the back panel, you'll find five more USB-A ports (2.0 and 3.1), an RJ-45 jack for Ethernet, and three audio ports. Peripherals with legacy USB-A cables are definitely covered, but you’ll need a hub or dongle to connect more USB-C devices. Meanwhile, the GPU features three DisplayPort 2.1 ports and one HDMI 2.1 port. For connectivity, you get Wi-Fi 6 for wireless internet and Bluetooth 5.3 for your peripherals. While these have been superseded by Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 in leading-edge fare, I wouldn’t hold it against this budget machine.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)As I mentioned earlier, you can pop open the glass panel to start tinkering: You'll find two thumbscrews in the back for your convenience. While the side panel might be tricky to attach properly, at least the interior has plenty of room for tinkering and part swapping.
For cooling, the system features four case fans, which, along with the air cooler on the CPU, can get somewhat loud when the system is under load. The fans are inconsistent, though; they rev up and down at random intervals when between demanding tasks, too, which can be a distraction if it catches my attention without headphones.
(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)CyberPowerPC built this rig around an Asus B860M Max Gaming AX motherboard. This MicroATX board features four PCI Express slots: The free three are a PCIe 4.0 x16 slot in x4 mode, alongside two PCIe 4.0 x16 slots in x1 mode, which can accommodate accessories such as a capture card. The fourth slot, occupied by the graphics card, is a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. The board includes three M.2 storage slots, one occupied by a 2TB drive in our configuration. (One of the unused M.2 slots is hidden on the reverse side of the board.) The board packs four DIMM slots (two open, in our configuration) that can host up to 256GB of RAM if you use 64GB modules. The slots support Intel Extreme Memory Profile (XMP) settings and accept CUDIMM memory modules. Our unit came with twin TeamGroup T-Force 16GB modules. If you want to add old-school SATA SSDs or platter drives, the case has bays for two 2.5-inch drives and one 3.5-inch hard drive.
That's all good stuff for a budget system. One of the few quibbles we have with the configuration, though, is future-looking. You might encounter constraints if upgrading the CPU or GPU in the coming years, because the Gamer Xtreme is equipped with a 600-watt 80 Plus Gold power supply (PSU), which limits the available juice. (The RTX 5060 alone requires a 550W PSU at minimum.) A 600W PSU is more than enough power for this configuration, but upgrading to a more potent current-generation graphics card beyond the RTX 5060 might not be possible without replacing the PSU, too, with a higher-wattage model. And if the next generation of xx60-level Nvidia graphics cards requires more than a 600W power supply, then you'll have no choice but to upgrade two parts at once.
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(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)Likewise, the Core Ultra 5 225 CPU is rated for 65W base power; go much further up Intel's line, and you will see higher base and turbo power-consumption measures that could bump up against the PSU's limits. In short, this PSU is well-suited to the parts CyberpowerPC supplies in the system, but it might require replacement down the line if you get too upgrade-ambitious.
Performance Testing: Ready for the Average PC Gamer
Gaming in 4K is not entirely out of the question, but the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme works best as a 1080p or 1440p gaming rig, especially if you want to run your favorite games at high detail settings. We chose four competing tower and mini-tower PCs to face off against the Gamer Xtreme...
Running against the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme is the twice-as-costly Alienware Aurora ($2,299.99 as tested), which falls on the high end of midrange gaming, and the Lenovo LOQ Tower ($1,149.99 as tested), which is a proper low-end gaming PC. In between those, we have the relatively compact Asus TUF Gaming T500 ($1,299.99 as tested) and the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 Gen 10 ($1,879.99 as tested). The TUF Gaming T500 is an unusual desktop that uses a laptop-class CPU paired with a full-fat desktop CPU.
As you can see, the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme is the least expensive PC among them, at least in this Costco config, so it may be a bit unfair to the CyberPowerPC system to compare them one-to-one. It'll be the underdog, but let’s see how it lands.
Productivity and Content Creation Tests
Our primary overall benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, tests a system's performance in productivity applications, including web browsing, word processing, and spreadsheet work. PCMark's Full System Drive subtest measures a PC's storage throughput.
Three more tests we rely on are CPU-centric or processor-intensive: Maxon's Cinebench 2024 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene; Primate Labs' Geekbench 6.3 Pro simulates popular use cases ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning; and we see how long it takes the video transcoder HandBrake 1.8 to convert a 12-minute clip from 4K to 1080p resolution.
Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Creators rates a PC's image editing prowess with a variety of automated operations in Adobe Photoshop 25.
Considering that the CyberPowerPC Gamer Xtreme is the most affordable of this comparison crew, it performed quite well. (Note: It would not run the PCMark 10 Productivity test, so it's missing from that chart.) We wouldn’t recommend pushing it through intensive output tasks, such as professional creative workloads. But overall, the desktop performs well enough for most work, and ran smoothly while juggling a bushel of Chrome tabs as Cyberpunk 2077 was open in the background. The Xtreme found itself seriously challenged only by the Alienware’s Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF, which ranked first place on most tests. That's a 20-core chip versus the 10 in the CyberPowerPC's Core Ultra 5 225, though, so no shocker there.
Graphics and Gaming Tests
We challenge all desktops' graphics with a quintet of animations or gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark test suite. The first two, Wild Life (1440p) and Wild Life Extreme (4K), use the Vulkan graphics API to measure GPU speeds. The next pair, Steel Nomad's regular and Light subtests, focus on APIs more commonly used for game development to assess gaming geometry and particle effects. Last, we turn to 3DMark Solar Bay to measure ray tracing performance in a synthetic environment.
For gaming desktops, our real-world gaming testing is based on the in-game benchmarks of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Cyberpunk 2077, and F1 2024. These three games—all benchmarked at full HD (1080p or 1200p), 2K (1440p or 1600p), and 4K (2160p) resolution—represent competitive shooter, open-world, and simulation games, respectively. Each game is run at high detail or the highest available settings.
On desktops, we run the Call of Duty benchmark at the Extreme graphics preset. Because the test can produce triple-digit frame rates even on low-end PCs, this approach yields sensible results for evaluating high frame-rate performance. Our Cyberpunk 2077 test settings aim to push PCs to their limit, so we run it on the brutal Ray Tracing Overdrive preset without DLSS or FSR. Finally, F1 2024, tested at Ultra High, measures the GPU's ability to render high-polygon-count models and densely detailed environments.
Based on these results, the Xtreme should be able to play most AAA games at high settings in 1080p or 1440p, and some games at 4K with lower settings. It outpaced the Lenovo LOQ’s RTX 4060 in all three game tests, but it fell well behind the other GPUs here, which makes sense given the GPU hierarchy. When we tried running the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmark at its killer Ray Tracing-Overdrive preset, it crashed at 4K resolution, likely due to the RTX 5060's limited 8GB of RAM, so don’t shoot for the moon. (Even if it had run, you’d see single-digit frame rates like the RTX 4060 in the LOQ desktop.)
If you’re taking full advantage of features like DLSS 4 frame generation in games that support it, the Xtreme’s RTX 5060 will get you far in the latest games. However, it will struggle to run the most intensive games at the very highest settings without it. Notice how the Xtreme aced the Call of Duty (CoD) and F1 24 tests at 1080p, not to mention CoD at 1440p, which represent mainstream gaming scenarios, but it couldn't post a playable frame rate in the brutally demanding top-end Cyberpunk test. Dialing down the Cyberpunk settings is the path to joy.
Don't let the Xtreme’s numbers compared with those more-potent systems discourage you, though: These results are impressive for the price, no doubt also helped by the 32GB of system RAM and the decently peppy CPU.