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Cube Reaper System Review

January 27th, 2015 James Leave a comment Go to comments

Overview

Most of us may well have heard and even purchased from box.co.uk, but few may know that they also sell pre-configured Gaming PCs! Well they do and there’s plenty to choose from too…

Today I will be taking a look at one from their Cube Reaper range. This particular Cube Reaper is housed in a Cooler Master CM-690 III case equipped with a Cooler Master V650 Power Supply. Inside there’s a MSI Z97 Gaming 3 motherboard fitted with a Intel Core i5-4690K CPU (running at an overclocked 4.2GHz) that’s cooled by way of a Cooler Master Seidon 120V Liquid Cooler. The system features 8GB of HyperX Savage memory running at 2400MHz. Graphics horsepower is provided by way of an MSI GEFORCE GTX 970, while storage is catered for with a 120GB HyperX Fury SSD, a single 1TB Seagate SSHD and a Samsung 16x DVD Writer. The Cube Reaper system also comes with Windows 8.1 64Bit pre-installed.

The Cube Reaper came well packaged from box.co.uk in a plain brown box, nicely adorned with Fragile labelled tape.

Opening the outer brown box allows us to see the inner Cooler Master 690 box that houses the main system. In addition to this we also have the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 motherboard box that contains the rest of the system’s accessories etc.

In the motherboard box there’s a Cube Reaper Quick Start Guide, MSI MB Drivers disc, MB User Guide, MSI Quick Installation Guide, MSI SATA Cable Labels and an MSI sticker and door hanger. Then we the have main power cable, additional cables for the PSU, PSU User’s Manual and warranty information, the Intel Core i5-4690K information and finally the MSI Geforce GTX 970’s Quick User’s Guide, Driver CD and a DVI-to-VGA adapter.

At the time of writing the Cube Reaper is retailing at approximately £999.00 from Box.co.uk and comes with a 2 year warranty.

Specifications/Features

courtesy of box.co.uk

* Additional details available here

First Impressions

Once out of the box first impressions of the Cube Reaper are good, the Cooler Master CM-690 III is a good looking case, it doesn’t shout Gamer but it looks cool enough in my eyes, with a smart silver Cube logo stuck to the front. From the outside the build quality looks good too, now let’s take a good look around the Cube Reaper and see what’s what…

Taking a look at the front of the Cube Reaper, at the top of the case we can see the Samsung 16x DVD Writer Drive in the top of the three available 5.25″ drive bays. Below this we find the aforementioned Cube logo and further down the Cooler Master logo, behind which is a 200mm intake fan.

Looking at the top of the case at first glance there’s not much to see; there’s a black smoked panel at the front followed by a large grilled area at the back. Maybe that smoked panel is hiding something… 😉

Aha, that smoked panel can be slid backward to reveal the main controls and the I/O, as well as what appears to be a tray area!

The Control Panel consists of (right to left): the main power button with reset button and storage activity LED, then we have x2 USB 2.0 ports, audio ports (headphone, microphone) and then x2 USB 3.0 ports.

Taking the top off of the Cube Reaper (courtesy of a single thumb screw at the back) allows us to see the Cooler Master Seidon 120V fan/radiator assembly mounted in the roof.

Removing the left side panel allows us to take a look inside the Cube Reaper and begin to appreciate the installation, which I have to say all seems very good.

We can also now take a closer look at the Cooler Master Seidon 120V cooler, that’s cooling the overclocked (4.2GHz) Intel Core i5-4690K. The overclock has been dialed in using the UEFI and uses a x42 multiplier and a Core Voltage setting of 1.2v.

Taking a quick look around the inside of the Cube Reaper we can see that the installation has been done well and all cabling has been kept to a minimum and the cables are neatly routed. With some cables sneakily tucked under the motherboard even… 😉

Power is supplied to the Cube Reaper courtesy of a Cooler Master V650 PSU. This particular model features an 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating and a semi-modular cable system. The PSU has been fitted fan side down to take advantage of the case’s PSU intake and filter in the base of the case.

One thing that I did notice that I wasn’t so keen on was that this PSU may well have black braided outer cables, but the inner cables are all multi-coloured. The end result can be seen in the image below right. Obviously it would be better if all of these cables were black as it does otherwise spoil the clean look of the build. In the same image you can also see the cabling for the ODD.

Looking from above we can see more of those pesky coloured cables, but other than that the installation is pretty neat and tidy. Taking central stage we have the MSI GTX 970 with its Boost Core Clock of 1216MHz and its 4GB of RAM running at 7010MHz.

As you can see the MSI example fitted features a stock cooler, that exhausts its hot air out of the back of the case. Now while this is not so great for dissipating heat it is good for getting that warm air out of the case. It’s also great if you were to want to add a second card in SLI. Although sadly this is something that you’ll not be doing with the Cube Reaper as the MSI Z97 GAMING 3 motherboard does not support SLI. This in my mind is a bit of an oversight as the motherboard natively supports CrossFire it would have made more sense to fit an AMD card and not an Nvidia one!

The Cube Reaper comes equipped with a 120GB HyperX Fury SSD, set as the main system drive and a 1TB Seagate SSHD Hybrid hard drive as a storage drive. While this setup is common for modern PCs, it’s not optimal for gaming as if you want to get into Battlefield 4 in a decent amount of time you’ll want it to be running on an SSD! HOLD ON James! Didn’t you just state that this is a Hybrid HDD though!? Of course the answer is yes. That Seagate drive (effectively) has an internal 8GB SSD as well, that it uses for caching your most commonly used files, so there’s a chance you might get into BF4 before the enemy does… It also means that Box are paying close attention to what they’re doing, always good to see; nice one guys…

Removing the right side panel of any pre-built system is always a bit of a concern as you never know what you might find. But I have to say that I was impressed with box’s installation and cabling which is really pretty neat and tidy to be fair.

Looking at the back of the Cooler Master CM690 III case we can see the 120mm exhaust fan at the top next to the MSI I/O shield. Accompanied by a handful of water-cooling grommets, although to be fair these are rarely used anymore. Then lower down we can see support for up to seven expansion cards, with position two and three already taken by the MSI GTX 970 Graphics Card.

Testing Methodology/Setup

After some initial testing with Windows 8 it was time to push the Cube Reaper through our suite of Gaming benchmarks. All of these benchmarks were run at stock settings (i.e. the PC was in the same state that it was sent to us in, no modifications were performed).

Benchmarks Used:

Batman: Arkham Origins	Tomb Raider (1.00.722.3)	Metro Last Light	UNiGiNE Heaven 4.0	3D Mark

Games played during testing:

Hardware Performance

Cube Reaper Gaming PC Results – (Stock settings)

Benchmark	Result
Batman: Arkham Origins	182.0 FPS
Tomb Raider	93.4 FPS
Metro Last Light	72.33 FPS
UNiGiNE Heaven	1292
3DMark (Fire Strike)	9487

Thanks to its MSI GTX 970 the Cube Reaper is no slouch when it come to Gaming. The PC performed well in our benchmarks closely replicating the scores that we recently obtained in our on Test Rig whilst taking a look at a GTX 970. All games tested and played ran at over 60FPS whilst running at 1920×1080, at this resolution the Cube Reaper sets itself up as your perfect Gaming partner. Going beyond HD though is going to require more Graphics horsepower I’m afraid…

During testing the Cube Reaper never put a foot wrong, there was no sign of instability and we saw no crashes at all. This suggests that its 4.2GHz overclock has been dialed in well. The PC was well setup with very little bloatware gracing its SSD (just BullGuard and Office!). One software issue I did come across was that Box had not changed the default install of the Killer Network App that automatically turns on ‘Enable Bandwidth Control’ and sets your max bandwidth to 10 MBs, for me and my internet connection this is too slow and had the effect of cutting my network speed in half! At default settings my Steam download speed was 10.6 MBs with Enable Bandwidth Control off it was a far healthier 19.6.

From a components point of view Box has chosen well, especially with the Case, CPU, Cooler, RAM, SSD & SSHD. Of course there’s two main components missing from that list, the first of which is the motherboard and the second the PSU.

Final Thoughts

We may not have seen many Full Review Systems here at pcG, but we are building them almost every day! And if we were to have a budget of £999, I’m not sure we could build a much better Gaming Rig than the Cube Reaper!

The Cube Reaper came to pcG well packaged in a plain brown box, within, the main system was hiding inside its own Cooler Master 690 III box. Once out of the box it was apparent that Box had put together a well thought out Gaming system, and the case looked good with its single left side window, if a little understated.

Taking a tour around the inside of the case, with the panels removed, it was obvious that a good deal of care and attention had been poured into the installation, that to be fair I can’t really fault.

The choice of components is also good (for the most part), the case is smart and should accommodate most Gamers needs and it provides adequate cooling for the GPU. The Intel Core i5-4690K is definitely the ‘go for’ choice for Gamers at the moment and at 4.2GHz it provides plenty of power for Gaming. The Cooler Master Seidon 120V CPU Cooler is also more than capable of cooling that overclocked CPU. The RAM is also a good choice with the 8GB HyperX Savage RAM kit running at a healthy 2400MHz. As you can see (from our benchmarks) the GTX 970 is more than capable of Gaming in HD across even some of the more demanding Games like Far Cary 4, Survarium and Metro: Last Light. There’s even some overclocking headroom in that card too, if you fancy getting your feet wet. The Storage setup is good (and typical) with a 120GB HyperX SSD system drive and a 1TB SSHD storage drive. The only issue with this is that your Games (likely living on the 1TB drive) will not benefit from the speed of your SSD. But cleverly Box have thought of this and equipped the Reaper with a SSHD that effectively contains an 8GB SSD, that caches your most used files!

The only issue that I can think of with the choice of components is that the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 is a CrossFire only motherboard, it does not support SLI. If it was me I would either install an AMD card so Crossfire was a viable option in the future. Or upgrade the motherboard to a Gaming 5 that supports both CrossFire and SLI. The other issue (and it’s just a niggle) is that the Cooler Master PSU may well have black outer sleeving (which is good), but internally all of the wires are multi-colored. If you take a look around the rig these coloured wires just keep cropping up, it would look so much better (IMHO) if they were black.

Overall though when you look at the price (£999), what Box have put together here is a damn good Gaming System, it looks good, runs fast and even comes with a two year warranty… 😉