CyberPower Gamer Xplorer 80 review

CyberPower is an American company that has been in operation for over ten years and specialises in the gaming market. The Gamer Xplorer 80 is the first product we have seen from the company and is designed as an entry-level product. True, you get a nicely designed lid with the obligatory blue lights, which seems to be more important to manufacturers than they are to gamers. However, once you open the system up it looks like any other standard machine.

The system weighs 3.5kg, but due to the extra design on the lid it feels top-heavy in the lap and there is a fair degree of screen bounce when you use the machine. That said, the build quality is solid for the asking price and even the keyboard feels as though it'll stand up to the daily grind.

We were also impressed with the touchpad and mouse buttons, which were solid and responsive. An external mouse can be added to either side of the case.

The 15.4-inch screen comes with a Super-TFT coating and even running on battery power proved bright. Not that you want to run this system on battery power for long, as with a battery life under test of 122 minutes, you won't really get anything like a respectable life. Should you want to connect the system to a larger panel, a DVI port is included, which at the price is a nice touch.

Play tested

Considering this is billed as a gaming machine, we were disappointed to find the ATi Mobility Radeon X700 in the system. While it comes with 512MB of dedicated memory, it's an ageing chip that has been superseded by the X1600, both in terms of technology and performance.

While it returned a 3DMark 2003 score of 4,844, which is respectable for this card, you won't be able to play anything but mainstream games on this laptop, and even then you'll find the resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels will need to be turned down.

The main specification is only impressive by the amount of memory that has been supplied: 2048MB of DDR memory. While this certainly helps things move along at a decent rate, the use of an AMD Turion 64 MT-40, which runs at 2.2GHz, is once again starting to show its age.

With a MobileMark 2005 score of 137, this is a poorly rated laptop. We also found it ran warm, especially down the right- hand side, and you won't want to use it on your lap for long. The fans are in constant use, making this a rather loud laptop.

The CyberPower Xplorer 80 isn't really a gaming laptop, but rather a budget machine with notions of gaming grandeur. However, other than its price, its performance is a little too mainstream to really compete.