iBuyPower RDY Scale B06 review

I’ve got to the point where I grimace when I see a listing for a gaming PC. The memory crisis has so severely gutted pricing and availability that I’ve found my eyes glazing over PCs whenever they’re on the screen in front of me.

One glance at our roundup of the best gaming PC deals shows that even getting a rig under $1,000 with a discrete graphics card is a bit of a struggle, and you are making significant compromises to get the price that… low. Okay, yes, it doesn’t feel low, but that’s the new normal. All praise our new AI overlords.

And iBuyPower routinely features among the most budget rigs. That’s because, be it smart compromises, the ability to buy in bulk, or a prayer to some sort of hardware god, its rigs are somewhat reasonable for prebuilds.

The RDY Scale B06 I’ve had across my desk shoves a budget Intel CPU and budget Nvidia GPU into its surprisingly large case, alongside a pretty small SSD and single-channel memory.

Features

RDY is iBuyPower’s preconfigured range, which means they are ready to ship pretty much the moment you hit ‘buy’. As such, the RTX 5060 / Intel Core Ultra 5 225F model I’ve got my hands on is the only version of the B06 you can currently buy.

For its relatively budget-friendly price, it makes some compromises, the biggest of which you will find in its memory and storage.

The memory is DDR5, but with a CAS latency of 40 and overall speed of 5200 MT/s, it’s not super fast. There’s also only one stick, so you are taking a hit to performance over dual-channel memory of the same capacity. How much depends on the game or workload, but there will be a hit.

Should you have the funds and the patience, you could technically track down a second module matching this same stick and bump your capacity up to 32 GB, but that’s a hard sell, and was even before the memory crisis. Most of the time, you are better off selling a single stick and buying two (at a loss) if you’re looking to upgrade, as it can be tough to track down the exact stick you need and even that doesn’t guarantee compatibility.

(Image credit: Future)

There’s just 1 TB of storage in this machine. That is pretty much the minimum I would want in a gaming rig right now, especially when you consider the actual storage available to you will likely be 50-100 GB lower than 1 TB.

The 1 TB in my rig translates to 952 GB. That doesn’t include browsers and any other Windows apps. Then, you might have Steam, Epic Games, likely the Nvidia app, plus any drivers, and any other media apps like Spotify. By only downloading the games I used for the benchmarks below, I was left with around 300 GB on the drive.

Now, we would have received twice the memory capacity for the price if it weren’t for the memory crisis, but you have to expect to pay more for gaming PCs right now, and those compromises make some sense from iBuyPower.

Performance

This rig is a sign of how bad the memory crisis has gotten. Late last year, we checked out the Acer Predator Orion 3000, which was just $20 more, came with a full-fat RTX 5070, a better Intel chip for multithreaded workloads, and even came in a cute compact case.

Because of that higher-tier GPU, the Orion outpaces this iBuyPower rig in every gaming test I conducted. Some by just a few frames, and some more convincingly so. Acer did make compromises here with PCIe 3.0 storage speed and 16 GB DDR4 memory, but it’s still all in all a better rig, and a much more compact one. The caveat, though, is that while you can find RTX 5070 PCs at this price on occasion, they are becoming ever more rare, and this SKU of the Orion 3000 is nowhere to be seen these days.

The RTX 5060 is a solid 1080p card that becomes a decent 1440p one if you are willing to stomach a bit of frame generation or upscaling. Still, it’s one of the weakest offerings of the RTX Blackwell generation.

In our tests, I spotted similar scores to RTX 4060 and RTX 4060 Ti rigs, and that’s partly because this same price point would have gotten you better CPUs a few years ago to throw alongside it, but also because the generational leap between the RTX 40- and RTX 50-series isn’t monumental.

The RTX 5060 / Intel Core Ultra 5 225 F combo is decidedly budget, as far as modern offerings are concerned, and you will spot that in our gaming tests. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora at Ultra on 1440p barely cracks 30 fps, and the same is true for Cyberpunk 2077 and Black Myth: Wukong. Upscaling makes these games much more playable, and the older Metro Exodus can stay around 60 fps.

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The AtomMan G1 Pro, with its low-profile RTX 5060 and AMD Ryzen 9 8945HX, outperforms it in Avatar, but the Scale B06 takes the win in everything else. The G1 Pro is kitted out with 32 GB of DDR5 5200 memory. That is double the capacity of the Scale B06, and dual-channel. That means it has not only twice the capacity but twice the available bandwidth, too. But the Intel chip helps the iBuyPower PC pull through for the win.

Notably, the 1% lows are almost the same for both rigs in Baldur’s Gate 3, despite the Scale B06 easily outpacing the G1 Pro in average fps. That’s likely down to the memory. Baldur’s Gate 3 is quite a CPU-heavy game, and the slower, lower-capacity RAM is hindering what should be a much faster chip in the Scale B06.

The Intel CPU in the Scale B06 has fewer physical cores and a lower boost clock than the 8645HX, but higher base clock speeds and a great L1 and L2 cache. In Cinebench, I saw a slightly higher single-core index for the Intel chip, but a significantly better multithread index for the AMD one. The Atomman G1 Pro has, however, gone up significantly in price even since our review in April.

The RTX 4060 Ti ABS Cyclone Aqua we reviewed last year seems to outpace or match this 5060 rig in most tests, only firmly losing in the Black Myth: Wukong upscaling benchmark. And with the RTX 5060, you pretty much need to get used to some level of upscaling if you want a smooth experience in modern games. Upscaling technology has gotten much better over time, and so has frame generation, but it’s still a pretty weak card as far as pure rasterisation is concerned.

Outside of gaming, the Team Group T-Force G50 SSD is decently performant and speedy, clocking in an overall index score of well over 2,000 in 3DMark’s storage test. Other creator tests don’t perform quite as well, with the CPU at this machine’s heart being fairly slow to handle a Handbrake video conversion, and sitting well behind the likes of the Aqua and G1 Pro in Time Spy Extreme and 7zip.

Though single-core Cinebench scores are solid, multithread scores are lacking. This all means that if you’re looking for a heavy-duty content creator machine, you’d best be looking elsewhere. In fairness, the single-channel memory should have already put you off, anyways.

Thermals

Perhaps owing to the large capacity of the case allowing smooth, unblocked airflow, or partly due to the large fan on the CPU, or maybe because both the CPU and GPU are fairly low wattage, this rig is positively frosty. Measuring temperatures during our range of creator applications, it is among the coolest we’ve tried in recent times, sitting well below the iBuyPower RDY Element 9 Pro R07. Admittedly, the latter iBuyPower machine is much more powerful, but its max CPU temps are significantly under the RTX 4060-equipped Lenovo Legion Tower 5i (Gen 8), the RTX 4060 Ti ABS Cyclone Aqua, and the RTX 5060 AtomMan G1 Pro. In fairness, the AtomMan is a very compact build, so you would expect higher thermals.

Still, the point stands that this iBuyPower handles its heat in a particularly cool fashion. Unfortunately, my model’s motherboard doesn’t appear to have a VRM temp sensor, so I couldn’t grab those temperatures, but the CPU and SSD heats were very manageable in the creator suite.

For gaming, it’s much the same story, with the GPU only maxing out at 67 °C. This is particularly impressive because it averaged 65 °C. It’s a similar story with the CPU, with both average and max sitting in the 50s.

Aesthetics

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The Scale B06 feels like an oddly large PC for what inside is a fairly compact build. You don’t have extra coolers hogging up space here, and the Asus RTX 5060 is a fairly small card, too. That means there is tons of empty space in the case. Its dimensions make it fairly similar to the Maingear MG-1 MK.II, but at least the Maingear with its overhead cooling and large RTX 5090 fits the space a bit better. Still, I suppose that means you can throw a few Hatsune Miku figures in the RDY Scale B06 and I’d be confident they won’t melt.

Other than the RGB fans and the iBuyPower logo slapped on the bottom of the front panel, the Scale B06 is fairly plain. It’s just a big black case with a clear side panel. Though the RGB in the fans do give it a bit of a gamer look. My model has pretty great wiring, all funnelling through the back of the rig tidily, so it’s super clean.

The first time I unboxed it, the Scale B06 was a bit of a task to get on the PC Gamer test bench table. It’s not only bulky, but quite heavy at 16 kg too. You are going to need quite a bit of space (and a few muscles) to fit it into your gaming den.

One thing that surprised me when taking the panels of this PC off is that they aren’t held in with screws. They are simply wedged into the side, but they require a bit of a yank to come out, which makes me feel comfortable that they won’t just pop off and spread broken tempered glass all over the floor when a breeze comes through the office.

Sound

(Image credit: Future)

As far as sound is concerned, the B06 offers a downright pleasant experience, only ever rising to a light hum at its most intensive. That translates to around 40 decibels, which is light enough that even a relatively quiet office will drown it out. In a totally silent environment, you will definitely hear the Scale B06, but you have to accept that with pretty much any bit of hardware, especially one with so many parts.

Even when I put my ear directly against the tempered glass while the rig was working its hardest, I could only make out a soft hum from the fans.

Software

My review rig showed up with a fresh Windows install, and the only other preinstalled software was Realtek audio drivers, Intel drivers, and the Nvidia app. iBuyPower doesn’t appear to load the Scale B06 with its own software, and that’s a boon given the size of modern PC games and the capacity left in the 1 TB drive that comes with it. It was easy to set up otherwise, and it took me mere minutes to get rid of Copilot and install Google Chrome.

Value

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Though the iBuyPower RDY Scale B06 retails at $1,479, it is currently available for $1,379 (and it was $100 less than that last week with a code). That puts it much closer to the rigs we tend to see in our roundup of the best gaming PC deals every week. But even then, it is outpaced by the iBuyPower Element SE, which is $80 less and comes with a better graphics card (RTX 5060 Ti) and a better gaming CPU (AMD Ryzen 7 9700F).

Then, if you simply want an RTX 5060 rig, the ABS Cyclone Aqua offers that, plus 32 GB of DDR4 memory (more of it, but worse speed) and an Intel Core i5 14400F (another 10-core chip but with less cache) for $230 less. There are some compromises with this ABS build (as you will be making with pretty much any build right now), but its compromises are in good places.

As you might expect from iBuyPower, it has thrown a gaming keyboard and mouse into the box, and you get a month of Xbox Game Pass with it too. I’d say the peripherals are decidedly meh, with the Chimera KM7 membrane keyboard feeling a bit too squishy and weak under the fingers, and the wired mouse being rather slow. But for something free in the box, that’s slightly above what I was expecting. And the keyboard even comes with a media dial, which is a slight plus. If I spent my entire budget on the PC, I’d be happy enough using the mouse and keyboard until I got together the budget for something better.

This is one of the hardest reviews I’ve ever written, because the market is ever-changing (for the worse), and this flux state means we have to accept less for more until at least 2027, and likely longer.

So, to simplify things, I thought I’d ask myself, ‘Would you buy this rig today if you absolutely had to get one?’ and my answer would be ‘definitely not for its full price’. However, I have seen this rig go as low as $1,280, and for that price, it does put up a fight among the most budget rigs. In fact, it could even eke out the Element SE and its RTX 5060 Ti at the right time.

The only problem is that iBuyPower only seems to sell the RDY models via its own website, so you have less of a chance of picking one up at a big discount at Walmart or Best Buy. But giving more options for relatively reasonable prices is only a good thing in my book, and if it gives a potential buyer slightly more choice at the $1,000-$1,500 range, it’s a solid enough addition to the market. iBuyPower has made some decent concessions for that price point; it’s just a shame it has to do that in the first place

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