CyberpowerPC UK Ultra XT Custom Gaming PC review: paint the town red

AMD has been on a tear lately, fighting a battle on two fronts. With new graphics cards and CPUs arriving in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it flurry, it didn’t take long for system integrators to grab the best of both and compile them into a system adorned from head to toe in red.

CyberpowerPC UK Ultra XT is a custom gaming rig with the best and brightest Ryzen and Radeon has to offer, adorned with a brand-new 9950X3D at its heart and RX 9070 XT for the graphical muscle. It’s a match made in heaven, but naturally only elevated by their surrounding components.

Specifications

It’s easy to see why AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D takes the spotlight here, as its unparalleled multi-core and gaming performance earned the CPU five stars in Sam’s review. Showcasing the tip top of what Zen 5 has to offer with a mighty 16 cores and 32 threads, it marries the architectural improvements with 128MB of sought-after 3D V-Cache to make it the ideal hybrid for anything you throw at it – rendering, gaming, AI workloads; there’s effectively no compromise aside from its premium price tag.

	CyberpowerPC UK Ultra XT Custom Gaming PC specs
CPU	AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D
CPU cooler	be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5
Motherboard	MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi
GPU	ASRock Steel Legend Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB
RAM	32GB (2x16GB) Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400
SSD	2TB Corsair MP700 Pro
PSU	850W Corsair RM850X (80 Plus Gold)
Other features	USB4 5Gb Ethernet Bluetooth 5.4 Wi-Fi 7
Case	NZXT H6 Flow RGB (Black)
Price	£2,599

You can’t have the best CPU without pairing a capable graphics card by its side. Fresh off the shelves, AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is an upper-midrange model that isn’t world’s apart from Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti. Its 16GB of VRAM is plenty capable of UHD gaming even if the GPU’s primary target is QHD, aided by ASRock Steel Legend’s 2,970MHz reference boost clock.

It’s a graphics card that looks nice enough mounted horizontally with a backlit logo off to the left, but would certainly benefit from propping up vertically to emphasise its gorgeous trio of RGB fans bouncing off its white casing. Not only would this sidestep the curiously-placed support bracket interrupting the third blower, it’d be an absolute showstopper.

That’s not possible in the NZXT H6 Flow RGB chassis, which instead gives you a panoramic view of all your hardware through two sets of tempered glass panels. I’m always in awe at how neat dual chamber cases are, hiding the 850W Corsair RM850X power supply and all its cables around the back. This comes with three 120mm intake fans and a single 120mm exhaust, each glowing the colours of the rainbow until you customise them.

Rather than going for a bleached build, Cyberpower went with the bold choice to make this a pretty panda PC. While the graphics card is dressed in white, matching the motherboard beneath it, the rest of the components and wiring are jet black. Part of this decision hinges on the fact be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 doesn’t come in any other colour, and it’s one of the single best air coolers you can have on your side complete with whisper quiet Silent Wings 4 fans.

Similarly, MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi is a great motherboard to house AMD’s processor, kitted out with the latest tech. WiFi 7 keeps signals strong when running wireless, while a 5Gb port my personal choice to get the most out of my gigabit+ broadband. There’s even a 40Gb USB4 port with enough oomph to support DisplayPort 1.4 via a Type-C connection. It’s not something you’ll use often with a Radeon RX 9070 XT on-hand, but it comes in handy when troubleshooting.

CyberpowerPC UK only uses one M.2 slot, filling it with a 2TB Corsair MP700 Pro. As a Gen 5 x4 NVMe, this eclipses most other SSDs with speeds reaching as high as 12,400MB/s. The beauty here is that there are still three unoccupied M.2 slots remaining, giving you the chance to add another Gen 5 drive and two Gen 4 models later down the line.

Finally, 32GB (2x16GB) Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 is a rather inspired choice of memory to thread the panda aesthetics together, featuring a two-tone silver and black heatsink topped with ARGB. These are not EXPO certified, which we’ve found to impact overclocking Ryzen 9 9950X3D. Fortunately, this affects synthetic benchmarks more than it does games, with just a few frames in it.

All of this comes with a rather fetching £2,599 price tag, which would be decent enough without the market being as tough as it is. As it stands, you’ll struggle to find any new component at its recommended retail price, meaning it’d currently cost you £2,358 to source the components yourself at the time of writing.

That extra £241 premium accounts for the labour of piecing it together, free shipping, a pre-installed copy of Windows 11 Home, and a standard warranty of five years’ labour, two years’ parts, and 12 months’ collect and return, alongside lifetime tech support.

Performance

As with every prebuilt, I’m testing CyberpowerPC UK Ultra XT Custom Gaming PC out of the box so it’s the truest to your experience. That said, I did have to make one small adjustment before getting benchmarks underway.

Investigating a noticeable grinding sound on first boot, I found the GPU support bracket was positioned right beneath the graphics card’s outer-most fan, interrupting the blower when in motion. It’s possible this could have occurred due to a shift in transit, but I can’t see any other way in which this brace could do its job other than to clamp the fan.

Fortunately, the added suspension isn’t needed for this particular card, so I opted to remove it to ensure the fans could run as intended. If nothing else, the support ensures Radeon RX 9070 XT and MSI MPG X870E Edge Ti WiFi arrived without any damage to the PCIe slot.

• CyberpowerPC Ultra 5080 Pro
  • AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D
  • MSI GeForce RTX 5080 Gaming Trio OC
  • MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk WiFi
  • 32GB DDR5-6000
  • 2TB Kingston Fury Renegade
• PCSpecialist Nebula Ultra R
  • Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
  • Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080
  • Asus Prime Z890-P WiFi
  • 32GB DDR5-6000
  • 2TB Solidigm P41 Plus
• PCSpecialist Nebula Supreme R
  • Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
  • Gigabyte Z890 Eagle WiFi 7
  • Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super
  • 32GB DDR5-5600
  • 2TB Samsung 990 Pro
• PCSpecialist Helio Elite
  • AMD Ryzen 5 9600X
  • Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB
  • Asus Prime B650-Plus
  • 16GB DDR5-5200
  • 1TB Samsung 990 Evo
• CyberpowerPC UK Ultra R99 Pro
  • AMD Ryzen 9 9900X
  • Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090
  • MSI MAG X670E Tomahawk WiFi
  • 32GB DDR5-6400
  • 2TB WD_Black SN850X

CPU

It’s a tight race in the single-core marathon, with less than ten points between the latest systems we’ve tested in Cinebench 2024. Zen 5’s improved IPC (Instruction Per Cycle) and lofty 5.7GHz boost frequencies keep AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D just shy of the top spot. Of course, this system comes into its own when flexing all 16 cores and 32 threads, decisively claiming the gold medal.

RAM

CPUs featuring AMD’s 3D V-Cache tend to slip behind their non-X counterparts, resulting in slower speeds and more latency. While this remains true here, Team Red has found its footing with Ryzen 9 9950X3D, leaping over 9800X3D. It’s still shy of 9900X, but fast frequencies aid 32GB Kingston Fury Renegade DDR5-6400 in at least keeping pace with Intel-based rivals.

Do note that these particular modules aren’t EXPO certified, which could hinder timings a touch, but each are clocked up to their rated 6,400MT/s.

Storage

CyberpowerPC Ultra XT gives you two good reasons to opt for a PCIe Gen 5 x4 drive: blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sequential read and write speeds. Our 2TB Corsair MP700 Pro hits 12,410MB/s and 12,051MB/s in CrystalDiskMark, respectively, storming ahead of Gen 4 alternatives by up to 76%. Safe to say you’ll never be last to load into a multiplayer game.

Apps

Since PCMark 10 tends to correlate to SSD performance, it’s no surprise to see CyberpowerPC Ultra XT at the front of the pack, leaning into its billing as a rig for content creators.

Gaming

Radeon RX 9070 XT doesn’t quite compete with Nvidia’s high-end Blackwell offerings in 3DMark Time Spy, even with the might of AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D and its lofty 128MB of L3 Cache. But then again, it was never meant to. Instead, AMD’s top RDNA 4 graphics card targets the midrange to great effect, giving you healthy performance for a conservative price tag.

Game	FPS @ FHD (Min. / Avg.)	FPS @ 1440p (Min. / Avg.)	FPS @ 2160p (Min. / Avg.)
Assassin’s Creed Mirage	135 / 197	112 / 160	68 / 100
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail	127 / 235	98 / 164	49 / 80
Forza Motorsport	71 / 108	64 / 78	34 / 42
Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord	210 / 352	161 / 256	88 / 132
Rainbow Six Extraction	283 / 388	191 / 276	90 / 145

Moving to real-world benchmarks, you can see the same 3D V-Cache doing some heavy lifting at Full HD, leveraging its might to keep triple-digit frame rates across the board. That’s no small feat for Forza Motorsport, which burns rubber on even the most specced-out rigs these days.

ASRock’s Steel Legend sets its sights on QHD above all other resolutions, serving up a fantastic showing that’ll keep most games north of 100fps. Just because it targets 1440p doesn’t mean 4K is off the table, however. You can play most games north of 60fps using the most gruelling settings possible, even with smatterings of ray tracing. Bump those down a bit and you open up a world of performance that either maxes out high refresh rate gaming monitors or keeps pixels dense.

Cyberpunk 2077	FPS @ 1080p (Min. / Avg.)	FPS @ 1440p (Min. / Avg.)	FPS @ 2160p (Min. / Avg.)
Native	34 / 39	21 / 23	10 / 11
FSR 3 (Quality)	62 / 71	40 / 45	20 / 22
FSR 3 (Quality) w/ FG	123 / 139	79 / 88	38 / 43

Add Frame Generation into the mix and you can see your performance quadruple from its native frame rate in Cyberpunk 2077. Much like our other tests, this uses the obscene RT Overdrive preset, so UHD isn’t inherently off the table if you lower settings accordingly. That said, knowing it’s very much playable at lower resolutions using these artificial frames is a feat.

Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t yet feature FSR 4, the latest in AMD’s upscaling arsenal, but it comes with a myriad of improvements for the few games which support it. We observed superior particle effects in Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart that emphasised the floaty nature of falling confetti, alongside finer details on objects to better parse blades of grass. Your main tasks will be finding games that support it in these early days but there are ways of getting around the lack of native integration.

Vitals

AMD prioritises power over efficiency with its flagship processor as Ryzen 9 9950X3D touts 170W TDP right out of the box. Putting it to the test in Cinebench 2024, the chip alone pulls upwards of 200W from the wall, driving the total system draw up to 313W under CPU-heavy workloads.

It’s the same story with RX 9070 XT carrying a 304W board power, although this is mostly in line with Nvidia alternatives. All in all, you can expect a high power consumption from CyberpowerPC Ultra XT Custom PC with 493W under load when playing games.

AMD outright recommends a liquid cooler for optimal performance on Ryzen 9 9950X3D and it’s easy to see why. Dark Rock Pro 5 does an admirable job of keeping the CPU chilled, but it’ll still heat up under stressful scenarios, hitting heights just under 80°C. Thankfully, it’s still far and away clear of its 95°C max operating temperatures.

Radeon RX 9070 XT, on the other hand, is one of the coolest graphics cards to pass through Club386 halls in quite some time. ASRock’s Steel Legend cooler shows the proficiency of a triple-fan solution at a solid 58°C. This leaves a little room for overclocking, if you’re feeling adventurous.

CyberpowerPC Ultra XT ships with an aggressive default fan curve set to run at 50% when temperatures hit just 40°C. This leaves the three intake fans spinning at 1,642RPM when idle, ramping up noise to a loud 45.3dBA. Since this isn’t far off their max rotations per minute, the full whack only climbs to 48dBA.

Needless to say, there’s a lot of room to tinker here, particularly when idle. Simply moving everything down to 33% at 40°C saves your ears plenty of ruckus, but I’d go even further than that.

Conclusion

CyberpowerPC UK has cherry-picked exceptional hardware for Ultra XT Custom PC. Not only does Ultra XT marry the best CPU with AMD’s top current generation graphics card on the market, but it also slots a chart-topping Gen 5 NVMe SSD in beside them. EXPO-certified memory would’ve been a better choice knowing how much it affects performance on Ryzen 9 9950X3D, but 32GB of DDR5-6400 ought to keep you ticking over whether you’re playing games, rendering videos, or overindulgent in Chrome tabs.

With graphics cards turned into gold dust at the time of release, prebuilts might just be the way to get hold of one as close to MSRP as possible. Of course, £2,599 is no small price tag, but there’s no more value in purchasing the parts separately. Just factor in that you’ll need to tinker with fan curves and GPU support brackets to get the most out of your new rig.