Starved by the limits of our System Builder Marathon benchmark suite, Thomas decides to explore what happens when he really uncorks the graphics system. A helping of 5760x1080 across three monitors is being...
We've already given you a pictorial walk-through of cases six through 10 of our 15-chassis round-up. Today, we build PCs inside of them, evaluate their value, and pick one as the most likely to satisfy your...
We've shown you our three System Builder Marathon picks. Now it's time for something new. Using Newegg's user ratings as a guide, we picked the site's most celebrated components, built a PC, and overclocked it....
Three different builders took two different approaches this quarter. Paul and Don struck out in search of more graphics performance, while Thomas gave up some GPU horsepower in favor of a stronger CPU. Whose...
Using the same sort of approach as Paul did yesterday, Don picks the parts for his System Builder Marathon machine with a bias toward gaming. How much performance can you expect from a mid-range PC sporting a...
Big radiators need lots of space that most enclosures simply weren't designed to offer. We're using Swiftech’s latest triple-fan cooler to test the fitment and performance in four cases supposedly set up to...
Do Intel’s Core i7-3000-series CPUs really need closed-loop liquid cooling? Today we're testing fourteen different LGA 2011-compatible air coolers on an overclocked Core i7-3960X in order to determine whose...
Surround sound headsets are often more practical than a home theater system attached to your PC. We compare eight premium models from Arctic, Psyko, Cooler Master, Logitech, Creative, Thermaltake, Corsair, and...
In this final excerpt from Scott Mueller's Upgrading And Repairing PCs, 20th Edition, we examine a number of power supply usage factors including power consumption calculations, power savings, power protection...
Today's article contains everything you've ever wanted to know about PC power supply specifications. Form factor dimensions, cable end pinouts, voltage/amp/watt specifications, and even compatibility issues are...
Cooler Master has revealed its new line of power supplies, the Silent Pro Hybrid series, which is fully modular and comes with a fan controller for the PSU and up to three system fans.
Big changes to a few components radically alter the performance profile of every machine in this quarter's competition. We’ve already seen how these changes affect the value of each machine, but how will they...
This quarter's $1000 enthusiast-oriented PC gets a new lease on life with a 30 GB solid-state drive and a couple of GeForce GTX 460s. Does that make a difference over the last build and its conventional hard...
The most hardcore gamers use multiple graphics cards in CrossFire and SLI configurations. And yet, slinging dual-slot cards together eats up a lot of expansion space. We compare five eight-slot cases with room...
Do you need an eighth slot for a CrossFire or SLI setup? We look at five cases that solve the problem created when motherboard vendors put a PCI Express x16 slot at the bottom of an ATX-based platform and you...
You spoke up in the first story from this quarter's System Builder Marathon, and we listened. Today we compare that first $2000 build to an alternative system based upon a flood of your recommendations. Call it...
Day 4 of our System Builder Marathon compares performance achieved to money spent. With outright speed the top priority, can either of our high-end systems beat the low-cost build when it comes to value? Or...
We give Sandy Bridge yet another shot in our second System Builder Marathon configuration of the month, leaning on Intel's Core i5-2500K. How well does it fare against the Lynnfield-based Core i5-700-series...
Gamers demand a lot from their computers, starting with the PSU. Therefore, almost every PSU manufacturer sells products optimized for gaming PCs. We introduce ripple and noise testing in this roundup to...