Finding a good deal on a prebuilt gaming PC isn't easy these days, especially with the ongoing global memory crisis. But what are the chances of stumbling across an unbeatable deal while you're out shopping for rotisserie chicken? Well, that's exactly what happened to one lucky Costco shopper, who walked away with a heavily discounted iBuyPower gaming PC for $1,140, down from its original price of $1,899.99. Now that’s a true winner winner, chicken dinner.

According to their post on the PC Master Race subreddit thread, u/klcp20 stumbled on one of the last display units at Costco during their weekly groceries run. While display units are generally sold at a discount to free up showroom space, buyers should keep in mind that such systems may have been on display for months and could be missing some accessories.

snagged a costco display unit couple of weeks ago from r/pcmasterrace

As per the shared spec sheet, the iBuyPower prebuilt PC includes an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which is rated as one of the best gaming CPUs that you can purchase today. Other components include 32GB of DDR5 memory, a 2TB SSD, and an Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card with 12GB of VRAM.

The system also comes with an AIO liquid cooler, a keyboard and mouse combo, and a copy of Windows 11, making it a well-rounded gaming PC for modern AAA games at 1440p and even some 4K gaming with the right settings. The buyer also notes that they plan to swap the included power supply, suggesting they aren't entirely confident in its quality.

Such deals don't come around often, but this also isn't the first time a display PC has been sold at a massive discount. Just a few months ago, another Costco shopper reportedly picked up what seems to be the exact same iBuyPower prebuilt gaming PC for $1,000, down from its original retail price of $1,899.99.

It is important to note that such discounts are largely dependent on individual stores and their inventory. We highly suggest keeping an eye on display units and limited-period discounts, especially at big-box retailers. If you're already making a trip for groceries, it might be worth taking a quick detour through the electronics section.

Meta PCs has announced preorders for Steamroller, the first prebuilt gaming PC running on SteamOS. The system features standard PC components that are broadly similar to those offered by Valve in the base variant of the Steam Machine. Priced at $1,299, the Steamroller is available for preorder now, with shipping set to begin on July 3, 2026. Buyers can also opt for an extended warranty, with two-year and three-year plans available for $180 and $240, respectively.

The Steamroller uses the Jonsbo D32, a well-ventilated m-ATX chassis with an AMD Ryzen 9600X, which is a 6-core, 12-thread CPU capable of boosting up to 5.4 GHz. Meta PCs mentions that the B650M/B650M Wi-Fi m-ATX motherboard will vary in brand and styling, meaning not all Steamroller PCs are alike, though they shouldn’t vary in terms of performance. For graphics, the system comes with AMD’s last-gen Radeon RX 7600 based on the RDNA 3 architecture with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. The system also includes 16GB of DDR5 RAM at 5600 MT/s, a 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD, a 240mm AIO liquid cooler, and a 650W Gold power supply unit.

In terms of hardware, the Steamroller seems competitive with Valve's new Steam Machine. Since it includes standard PC components, one also gains the ability to upgrade almost any component in the future, unlike the Steam Machine, which only allows you to swap the RAM and storage. That said, the Steam Machine is more compact, measuring at 152 × 162 × 156 mm (6.0 × 6.4 × 6.1 inches), justifying its console/living room PC purpose.

Another aspect to consider is practicality. The Steam Machine supports HDMI CEC, a protocol that allows it to communicate and control compatible devices such as your TV and soundbar. This allows you to power on the Steam Machine and your TV simultaneously, and even switch to the correct input, without leaving your couch or reaching for a remote. Unfortunately, HDMI CEC is not supported on most PCs, including the Steamroller. The Steam Machine also features standby and quick resume functionality, which allows you to put the system to sleep and jump back into your game almost instantly.

The Steamroller is essentially aimed at potential customers who want a gaming PC running on SteamOS with the flexibility of standard PC hardware. While it may lack some of the living room-focused features available on the Steam Machine, it makes up for them by offering a system that is easier to upgrade and repair, while also offering a way to experience SteamOS without assembling an entire system.

Building a mini-ITX gaming PC today can burn a serious hole in your wallet, primarily due to the premium pricing on ITX motherboards, SFX power supplies, and small-form-factor cases. Moreover, the ongoing AI boom has led to a sharp increase in price for memory, storage, and graphics cards. The best way to dodge this premium today is to invest in a prebuilt such as this Cooler Master NR2 Pro mini-ITX gaming PC from Newegg for $2,799.99, down from its original price of $3,199.99.

As an added bonus, customers also get a free copy of Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight worth $69.99 and a one-year subscription to the NordVPN Plus Bundle worth $84.99.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The compact PC is built inside the Cooler Master NR200P Max case offering a volume of just 18.25L, which is roughly the size of a large shoebox. The case comes with a Cooler Master 280mm AIO liquid cooling solution while power is delivered via an 850W 80+ Gold SFX power supply. Powering the system is the Intel Core Ultra 7 265F processor which features 20 cores, 20 threads, and max boost clock speeds of up to 5.3 GHz. The motherboard is a Gigabyte B860I Aorus Pro Ice with 32GB (2x16GB) of DDR5 6000 MT/s RGB RAM.

For storage, the system comes with a 2TB Gen 4.0 M.2 SSD while the motherboard includes an additional M.2 slot in case you want to add more capacity in the future. As for the graphics card, the prebuilt includes an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 from Gigabyte with 16GB of GDDR7 memory and enough grunt to handle 4K gaming. The listing also mentions the option of a glass or mesh side panel along with modern connectivity options including Thunderbolt 4, Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 5.4, and 2.5 gigabit Ethernet.

The Cooler Master NR2 Pro prebuilt offers a convenient way to avoid the mini-ITX premium as well as the painful process of bringing it all together. At its discounted price of $2,799.99, it is a recommended option for gamers who are looking for a powerful yet compact prebuilt without the hassle and expense of building a comparable mini-ITX system.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

Building a gaming PC can be an overwhelming task, especially if it's your first one, as the sheer number of choices and technical specifications can make the process feel intimidating. That's where prebuilts come to the rescue, and today we have a solid mid-range offering from MSI that is currently on sale at Newegg. Originally priced at $1,899, the MSI Codex Z2 A8NVM-485US is down to $1,499, offering savings of $400. Newegg is also offering special bundles with this prebuilt PC, including a 32-inch 4K monitor, keyboard, mouse, wireless headset, webcam, and even a UPS, helping you complete your next battlestation.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The MSI Codex Z2 comes with a compact airflow-focused chassis with a large mesh panel at the front with triple 120mm ARGB fans as well as a glass side panel to showcase the internals. The PC is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8700F, a powerful Zen 4 processor featuring 8 cores, 16 threads, and an AI-accelerating NPU. It is capable of hitting up to 5 GHz boost clocks, however, it does not come with an integrated graphics solution. For graphics you get the Nvidia RTX 5060 Ti 8GB offering all the latest tech including DLSS 4.5 with multi-frame generation, improved ray tracing performance, and more.

The rest of the features include 16GB of DDR5-5200 RAM, a 2TB M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSD to store all your games, and a 650W 80 Plus Gold power supply which should offer enough juice to power all the hardware. The CPU is cooled using a single-tower air cooler and in terms of wireless connectivity the system comes with built-in Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3. I/O options include a USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C, along with dedicated headphone and mic ports at the front. At the rear you get two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A, four USB 2.0 Type-A, audio ports including optical, gigabit Ethernet, and even a PS/2 port.

If you have been considering a gaming PC upgrade from an older generation, the MSI Codex Z2 is worth a look at its discounted price of $1,499. The combination of a Ryzen 7 8700F, RTX 5060 Ti, and 16GB of DDR5 memory should provide plenty of horsepower for modern games at 1080p and some older titles in 1440p resolution.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

Bundle deals are often the easiest way to sidestep today's inflated pricing of memory, SSDs, and GPUs. However, a well-configured prebuilt can be even more compelling, offering compatible components and the convenience of a fully assembled system out-of-the-box. One such prebuilt is the ABS Cyclone Aqua that is currently listed on Newegg for $1,399.99, down from its original price of $1,799.99 resulting in savings of $400. Customers can get an additional discount of 5% using the promo code ABSGAMER5 during checkout, essentially bringing the final cost down to $1,329.99, and an overall saving of $470.

• Check out this deal on Newegg

The ABS Cyclone Aqua gaming PC features hardware suitable for modern AAA gaming at 1080p. It is powered by an Intel Core i7-14700F, which is a solid 20-core (8 P-cores + 12 E-cores) processor with 28 threads and boost clock speeds of up to 5.4 GHz. The CPU is paired to an ASRock B760M-CX motherboard with 32GB (2 x 16GB) of DDR5 6000 MT/s memory from G.Skill. The motherboard also comes with onboard Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2. For storage, the system includes a 1TB Kingston SNV3S M.2 2280 Gen 4 SSD offering read speeds of up to 5,000 MBps and write speeds of up to 3,500 MBps.

Graphics duties are handled by the MSI Shadow RTX 5060 with 8GB VRAM, which is essentially Nvidia’s latest entry-level 1080p card. While it may not be ideal for high-end AAA gaming, it should be good enough for less demanding titles, especially if you are into competitive FPS shooters. The rest of the features include a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Spectrum V3 CPU air cooler, a 650W 80+ Gold power supply unit, and a decent mid-tower case with a glass side panel, as well as two 120mm ARGB fans at the front and one at the rear.

If you've been holding off on a new gaming PC due to high component prices, this deal at $1,329.99 is definitely worth your attention. Considering that sourcing comparable components individually would likely push the total cost beyond $1,500, this prebuilt offers excellent value for the money.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

Building a PC can be daunting for many of us, and with current memory and SSD prices, opting for a prebuilt system makes sense. There are plenty of OEMs and independent system integrators to choose from, but if you’re looking for something that delivers peak performance, the HP Omen 35L gaming desktop is worth considering. Originally retailing at $3,299.99 via HP’s official online store, the desktop is currently available with a $260 discount as part of the President’s Day sale. Additionally, applying the promo code PRESDAYPC100 at checkout knocks off another $100, bringing the final price down to $2,939.99.

• Check out this deal on HP.com

The HP Omen 35L uses a mid-tower chassis with a glass side panel and comes with dual pre-installed ARGB intake fans at the front, along with a single rear exhaust fan. It also includes a 240mm AIO liquid cooler to help keep CPU temperatures under control.

Powering the system is Intel’s Core Ultra 9 285K, the flagship processor from Team Blue’s current-generation Arrow Lake desktop lineup. The chip features 24 cores and 24 threads, with boost clocks reaching up to 5.7GHz. While the Core Ultra 9 285K isn’t the absolute best gaming CPU compared to AMD’s X3D processors or even some of Intel’s older 13th- and 14th-gen chips, it still delivers more than enough performance for high-end gaming and demanding workloads.

The rest of the specifications include 64GB of Kingston Fury DDR5 memory running at 6000 MT/s, complete with a heatsink and RGB lighting. Since the motherboard offers four DIMM slots, there’s room to expand the memory further if needed down the line. On the graphics side, the system is equipped with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080, a GPU that currently sells for well over $1,200 on its own and delivers enough horsepower to handle modern AAA titles at 4K. It also supports current features such as DLSS 4 and next-generation ray tracing. Storage is provided by a 2TB PCIe Gen 4 NVMe M.2 SSD, with two additional M.2 slots for expansion.

The Intel Z890 motherboard in the Omen 35L offers a solid selection of I/O options. On the rear, you get two USB Type-C ports, one with Thunderbolt 4 support and another limited to USB 3.2 Gen 2 speeds (10Gbps), along with two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports (5Gbps), four USB 2.0 Type-A ports, 2.5-gigabit Ethernet, a microphone input, and line-in and line-out audio jacks. The front I/O adds another USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port, two USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports, and a combined headphone/microphone jack. Other important features include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, and an 80+ Gold-rated 1000W power supply.

If you have been eyeing a no-compromise prebuilt with top-tier components, this President’s Day deal makes the HP Omen 35L a compelling option at under $3,000.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

If you are on the hunt for a modestly priced gaming PC for this Black Friday, the Skytech Nebula 2 is on sale at Walmart for just $999. With pricing for memory skyrocketing, buying this prebuilt might make more sense than attempting to price up your own, with equivalent hardware.

At this price, the Skytech Nebula 2 is poised to deliver solid gaming performance, especially if you were to pair it with a 1440p display to match. It should run every modern title, and it also comes bundled with Windows 11, so you don't have to mess around with purchasing a license yourself. Combined with the parts featured, it's a pretty decent bargain for the budget-conscious PC buyer.

• Grab the Skytech Nebula 2 at Walmart

This sub-$1000 gaming PC features the AMD Ryzen 7 9700X CPU, an AMD RX 9060 XT 16GB, 32 GB of DDR5-5200, a 240mm all-in-one liquid cooler, a gold-rated 650W PSU, and also sports a 1 TB NVMe SSD, packed into what appears to be a mid-tower form-factor.

One area that you may wish to expand upon is the mere 1 TB of NVMe storage, as many games can and will fill up a significant portion of that. There are no details on the motherboard included with the build, so it's unclear how many additional NVMe slots you might get. However, you can easily attach external storage if you need more room to store games on the PC.

The PC also features adequate ports with USB 3.2 Gen1, 3.0 and 2.0 ports peppered throughout the chassis, and comes equipped with 802.11AC Wi-Fi as standard, so you won't have to think about rooting around for an Ethernet cable, either.

The front mesh panel of the system should allow for adequate airflow into the chassis, keeping all of the important components cool. Best of all, Walmart claims that the Nebula 2 also comes with "No Bloatware", which is something that plagues many other prebuilt PCs. Grab this one while you can, getting a gaming PC with this calibre of components at under $1000 is looking pretty this Black Friday.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best Black Friday PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you're looking for a prebuilt gaming PC bargain during Black Friday, then take a look at the deal on this MSI Aegis ZS2 gaming desktop for $1649.99 at Best Buy. Assembling your own PC isn't for everyone, as buying a bunch of expensive parts and playing PC Lego can feel daunting to someone constructing their own rig for the first time. Still, if you want to play the latest and greatest PC games, then picking up a prebuilt gaming PC with all the components pre-assembled and essential software already installed and configured for you can save you a lot of potential stress and worry.

• Grab this deal at Best Buy

Ready to game as soon as you plug it in, the MSI Aegis ZS2 is stacked with current parts like AMDs Ryzen 9 9900X processor, an Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card with 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM, 32GB of 6000 MHz DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD for your games library, and a 360mm AIO cooler to keep that CPU nice and chilled.

The big benefit of choosing a prebuilt PC is the warranty and support, where if a part fails, you don't have the hassle of troubleshooting every component; the whole PC is covered under a single umbrella, and can save you a lot of time and stress if your PC should unfortunately go wrong. This is great for people buying a PC who might not have the technical know-how to fix it themselves.

The Aegis ZS2 comes packed with plenty of ports, with 4x USB 2 Type-A, 5x USB 3.2 Type-A, and 1x USB 3.2 Type-C. Along with WiFi 6E, there is Bluetooth and a gigabit Ethernet connection. This PC build configuration is a good bang-for-buck value proposition when compared to similar-spec prebuilt PC builds. There's even a mouse and keyboard included so that you can be up and running as soon as you plug everything in.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best Black Friday PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

Buying a prebuilt gaming PC is a wise choice for anyone who prioritizes convenience over hand-picking every component and going through the entire build process. While the ongoing Prime Day sale is packed with deals on some of the best prebuilt gaming PCs, a standout option from Zotac is on sale over at Newegg. The Zotac Mek prebuilt gaming PC, which usually goes for $3,299, is selling for $2,349 with a savings of $950. Featuring AMD’s Ryzen 7 9700X CPU and an RTX 5080 GPU, the system is capable of offering ample performance for high-end 4K gaming and demanding creative workloads right out of the box.

• Up to $700 off gaming PCs at Amazon

The gaming PC is built inside a vertical tower chassis from Thermaltake, specifically the Tower 600. This non-traditional PC case comes with an octagonal prism shape along with tempered glass panels at the front to showcase the internals. The case is said to support up to a 420mm AIO radiator on the right side and a 360mm AIO radiator on the left side, along with provisions for up to thirteen 120mm or nine 140mm fans. For ease of maintenance, the case also includes multiple dust filters that can attach magnetically.

The system platform includes the Asrock Phantom Gaming X870 Riptide Wi-Fi ATX motherboard with a preinstalled 2TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD and 32GB of dual-channel DDR5 6400 MT/s memory with RGB lighting. The Ryzen 7 9700X CPU is cooled using a 360 mm AIO liquid cooler from Thermaltake, while power is supplied using a 1,000W 80+ Gold certified PSU. The included GPU model is the Zotac Gaming GeForce RTX 5080 Solid, which is currently the most affordable RTX 5080 offered by the GPU manufacturer. Additionally, the PC also comes with preinstalled Windows 11, support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4, and the benefit of professionally managed cables.

Here’s a quick look at the individual pricing of each part. Please note that the following parts have been hand-picked and may not be the same as supplied with the prebuilt PC. However, we have chosen the closest and most reliable option that matches the specifications given in the listing.

At its current deal price, this Zotac MEK prebuilt gaming PC offers great value, especially when considering the high-end components packed inside. If you were to purchase the same parts individually it would cost you over $2,700, as validated by current listings on PCPartPicker.com. This means that you still end up saving close to $350, on top of skipping all the hassles of assembling the parts, cable management, and setting up Windows.

We are working hard to find the best computer hardware deals for you this Amazon Prime Day. We cover the hottest deals in real-time at our Best Amazon Prime Day Deals Live page. If you're looking for more savings, check out our Amazon Prime Day deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

If you've been looking to pick up a cheap gaming PC to enter the PC gaming scene, get your hands on cheaper games and better modding support, this could be a useful deal for you. It's a no-nonsense, practical build that will perform like a current-generation games console (ish) but can tweak a game's video settings to a greater extent for a better experience.

Available from AWD-IT, this prebuilt Air Mesh Ryzen 5 5500 and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 Gaming PC is just £549, saving £400. With a selection of components that also includes the RAM, storage, and PSU, this PC comes complete with almost everything you need to start gaming straight away.

There is, however, one thing missing, and that's the OS or operating system. You can install your own Linux-based OS or pick up a copy of Windows cheaply or for free and install it yourself. If that's a little too complicated for you, then you can select a copy of Windows in the drop-down menu, but this will cost you an extra £89

This system is pretty barebones, but you can add to it at a later date if you wish. It's easy to upgrade with more RAM or more storage, like a 1TB SSD or higher. To give you an idea, the price of just the RTX 4060 GPU is around £270, so you're picking up every other part, including the case, motherboard, RAM, CPU, PSU, SSD, etc, for just £279. Plus, you also get free shipping included.

Assembling your own PC isn't for everyone, but if you want to play the latest and greatest PC games now, then you're probably looking at picking up a prebuilt gaming PC with all the components pre-assembled and essential software already installed and configured for you. There are lots of brands to choose from, MSI, Dell, Corsair, and many more, but what often determines your choice is price, and today we have a deal on MSI's Aegis ZS2 build.

Good to game as soon as you plug it in, the MSI Aegis ZS2 gaming desktop is now only $1,899 at B&H Photo after a $400 discount. Stacked with the latest and greatest parts, the MSI Aegis ZS2 contains an AMD Ryzen 7 9700X processor, an Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics card with 12GB of GDDR7 VRAM, 32GB of 6000 MHz DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD for your games library, and a 360mm AIO cooler to keep that CPU nice and chilled.

The big benefit of choosing a prebuilt PC is the warranty and support, where if a part fails, you don't have the hassle of troubleshooting every component; the whole PC is covered under a single umbrella, and can save you a lot of time and stress if your PC should unfortunately go wrong. This is great for people buying a PC who might not have the technical know-how to fix it themselves.

There are plenty of ports for connectivity, which include 4x USB 2 Type-A, 5x USB 3.2 Type-A, and 1x USB 3.2 Type-C. Along with WiFi 6E, there is Bluetooth and a gigabit Ethernet connection. This PC build configuration is pretty good bang-for-buck value, compared to similar-spec prebuilt PC builds.

We've said before that it's not a good time to buy a high-end graphics card. We expect new releases from Nvidia, AMD and Intel within the next couple of months. In fact, we'd be very surprised if we don't have an RTX 5080 and 5090 launch in January.

However, you might be sitting here in early December thinking "I don't care about what happens in January, I want the best graphics card I can buy today." And that card would be the RTX 4090. 

If you care about ray tracing, the differences are quite stark. With an RTX 4090, at 4K resolution, you get a playable 55 fps on the RTX 4090 and 103.9 fps at 2K resolution. However, there's a huge step down on those frame rates when you use the next card down, the RTX 4080 Super.

There may be a huge difference when we finally see the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080, but for now, the RTX 4090 is the leader. Unfortunately, the cards themselves are selling out like crazy. 

When I started writing this article, I intended to include links to RTX 4090 cards that were available for $1,799 and $1,819 at Best Buy. By the time I'd written a couple of paragraphs, they were all sold out. You could probably still find an RTX 4090 for $2,300 or more, but that's an insane price to pay.

Our advice: if you really want an RTX 4090 for your build, buy a prebuilt desktop with an RTX 4090 inside. Here are a few examples (while they last).

We are working hard to find the best computer deals for you this Cyber Monday. If you're looking for more savings, check out our Cyber Monday Computer Hardware Deals Live blog for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals Live blog, Monitor Deals Live, Graphics Card Deals, or CPU Deals pages.

In China, AMD (via VideoCardz) releases prebuilt desktops featuring the Ryzen 7 9800X3D. The prebuilts, already listed on Chinese e-tailer JD, are sold directly by AMD’s official store, not by an OEM.

These PCs specifically sport the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which officially launches on November 7 and has a $479 price tag. AMD claims the 9800X3D is 8% faster than the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and beats Intel’s flagship Core Ultra 9 285K by 20%.

However, AMD didn’t make every part of it on its own (except the CPU); instead, it took the approach of companies like Maingear and CyberPowerPC. Asus supplies the motherboards and graphics cards, the 360mm AIO liquid cooler is made by G.Skill, and the case is from LOONGTR. However, the case does sport a Ryzen logo, presumably a custom modification explicitly made for AMD’s prebuilt.

The PCs all come with 32GB of DDR5-6000 memory and mostly feature the same TUF Gaming B650M-Plus motherboard alongside a 1TB SSD. However, a single model uses the Prime X670E-Pro board and has a 2TB SSD but no graphics card. Converted to American dollars, the price tag on the cheapest PC (which doesn’t even have a GPU) is about $1,000, while the most expensive model with the RX 7900 XTX is almost $2,100.

Interestingly, two AMD prebuilt feature Nvidia GPUs: one with the RTX 4070 Super and the other with the RTX 4070 Ti Super. The Nvidia-powered models go for a bit of a premium compared to the prebuilt ones that use AMD GPUs, as the 4070 Ti Super configuration is about $2,000, only a tiny bit cheaper than the 7900 XTX-equipped prebuilt.

AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D-powered desktops are not its first, and AMD’s official JD page features many other prebuilts that use Ryzen 7000, 8000, and 9000 CPUs, as well as RX 6000 series cards, such as the China-exclusive RX 6750 GRE.

Like the Ryzen 7 9800X3D, AMD’s new prebuilt seems to launch on November 7 and is just in time for November 11, also known as Singles’ Day. This holiday has become a major shopping holiday in China, akin to Black Friday in the US.

Celebrate Father's Day this Sunday, 16th of June, with a new iBUYPOWER RDY prebuilt gaming PC. Whether it's a gift for yourself or the father figure in your life, a shiny new gaming PC is just the ticket for a nice relaxing gaming session. Plus, if you combine one of iBUYPOWER's PC deals with one of our iBUYPOWER coupons, you could save even more on a new gaming rig.

iBUYPOWER's RDY lineup of gaming PCs all come pre-installed with Windows 11 Home and offer a selection of different curated PC specifications to cater to different tiers of gaming PCs in not only performance but also price.  Whether your preference is for high frame-rate esports gaming or high-end graphical fidelity and ray-tracing, there's an iBUYPOWER RDY PC for you. 

Listed below are four iBUYPOWER deals from their RDY lineup, featuring a range of different PC configurations with attractive PC cases like the Scale, Slate, and HYTE Y60/Y70 cases, to the selected hardware components tailored to offer maximum performance for the price.

Take advantage of Tom's Hardware coupon code.  Enter TOM6 at the checkout and save $50 off RDY systems over $999, and $100 off a system over $1,999.

All of the above PCs are pre-built, in stock, and come with free two-day shipping. iBUYPOWER also offers a standard three-year warranty on PCs consisting of three years of labor and one-year parts. See the iBUYPOWER website for more information on their warranty specifics.

Today's deal is on a prebuilt gaming PC that's ready to game as soon as you plug it in. If building your own gaming rig isn't your thing, you don't know that much about PC building, or you perhaps don't want any hassle in setting either yourself or a family member up with a new gaming PC, then this deal has you covered. With a mix of great component choices and an excellent price point, this is one of the best prebuilt gaming PC deals I've seen of late.

The MSI Aegis RS2 gaming desktop (model: C14NUE7-824US) is now only $1,599 at Newegg after a $300 discount. As an added bonus, you can pick up a copy of the controversially priced upcoming Star Wars Outlaws game from Ubisoft. As far as I can tell, this is a digital code for the standard edition tier of the game and is listed at $69 for pre-order directly from Ubisoft. This is a bundle offer add-on that can be redeemed due to the system containing a qualifying Intel CPU.

Inside the MSI Aegis RS2 is an Intel Core i7-14700KF processor, an Nvidia RTX 4070 Super graphics card with 12GB of GDDR6X VRAM, 16GB of 5600 MHz DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD for your games library, a 360mm AIO cooler, a 750-watt power supply, and Wi-Fi 7, all wrapped in an MSI GUNGNIR 212R PC case. This a pretty good value-for-money configuration at this price and these components will certainly allow this PC to power through any game you throw at it.

There are plenty of ports for connectivity with a USB 3.2 Type-C (5 Gbps) and USB 3.2 Type-A on the front IO and loads more on the rear IO which includes 2x USB 2 Type-A, 4x USB 3.2 Type-A, and 1x USB 3.2 Type-C (20 Gbps).  Along with WiFi 7, there is Bluetooth 5.4 and a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet connection.

This prebuilt gaming PC also includes an MSI gaming keyboard and mouse, so the only extra item you'll need to be up and instantly gaming is a monitor.

iBUYPOWER has a range of discounts this Memorial Day weekend with savings to be made on a selection of their RDY prebuilt gaming PCs continuing until the end of the month (May, 31). If you're in the market for a new gaming rig, this could be the perfect time to pull the trigger and pick up a powerful gaming computer at a great price. Plus, if you combine the deals with one of our iBUYPOWER coupons you could save even more. 

The RDY lineup of gaming PCs all come installed with Windows 11 Home and feature a range of highly-curated product selections from iBUYPOWER to cater to different tiers of gaming PCs in not only performance but also price.  Looks also aren't overlooked with attractive PC cases like the Scale and Slate cases to the giant side windows of the panoramic HYTE Y60 and Y70 cases showing off your precious components inside. 

Listed below are four of iBUYPOWER's RDY lineup featuring a range of different PC configurations with selected components that are tailored to offer maximum performance for the price. 

All of the above PCs are built, in stock, and can be purchased and on their way to you almost immediately thanks to free two-day shipping on your orders. iBUYPOWER also offers a standard three-year warranty on PCs consisting of three years of labor and one-year parts. See the iBUYPOWER website for more information on their warranty specifics.

Prebuilt computer retailer iBUYPOWER has a new selection of RDY-built gaming PCs listed on their website with a celebratory discount available for the different SKUs. These specific PC configurations are focused on esports gaming and come in four different build flavors all with Windows 11 Home installed and with components stepping up in performance in conjunction with price over the different tiers. Heavily focusing on performance in games such as VALORANT and League of Legends, iBUYPOWER has prepared a set of different configurations, designed to help give gamers the upper hand when it comes to playing their favorite esports titles, across different price points.

You can save money on each of these RDY configurations right now as part of iBUYPOWER's 25th-anniversary celebrations. Customers can also get extra discounts by combining any of iBUYPOWER's offers with one of our iBUYPOWER coupons. As I mentioned, there are four different PC builds, two of which are designated as Scale and Slate respectively, and are named after iBUYPOWER's recently launched cases - the Scale Mesh case and the Slate 8 Mesh Pro case. I’ll list the components for each PC so that you can see exactly what’s included.

With no proprietary parts, you can choose to upgrade any part of these systems in the future (compatibility allowing of course) to keep your PC performing to your esports gaming needs. All of the above PCs are built, in stock and can be purchased and on their way to you almost immediately thanks to the free two-day shipping.

A bonus of buying a pre-built gaming PC is that you don’t have to be knowledgeable about PC parts and PC building. The worry of any warranty or parts failure is all contained under one warranty umbrella, making it much easier to rectify unforeseen issues you may encounter with a new PC. iBUYPOWER offers a standard three-year warranty on PCs consisting of three years of labor and one-year parts. See the iBUYPOWER website for more information on their warranty specifics. 

Prebuilt gaming PCs sell well because of convenience, and not necessarily because they're cheaper than buying the parts and assembling them yourself. Having a one-stop shop for warranties and RMA services should the worst happen is definitely a lot less hassle than diagnosing any faults, trying to find the faulty part, and then getting that individual component replaced. Some people aren't that savvy when it comes to PCs, and others just want to pick something up off of the shelf that will play games and be useful for some productivity work — if any of these apply to your situation, then this is the deal for you.

Today we're highlighting this deal on the Lenovo Legion Tower 5 from Best Buy that's on sale for $1,299 — reduced from $1,929, a saving of $630. I've seen this prebuilt gaming PC on sale for $1,399 before, but with an extra $100 knocked off that sale price it's even more attractive. At its original $1,929 price, the price-to-parts ratio is terrible. If you built a PC yourself with similar parts, it would be a lot cheaper, but it defies the point of buying a prebuilt gaming PC.

The components inside this SKU of the Lenovo Legion T5 consist of an AMD Ryzen 7 7700X processor, a 12GB RTX 4070 graphics card, 16GB of 5600MHz DDR5 RAM, a 512GB NVMe PCIe SSD, and 1TB HDD for storage. Although the 512GB SSD is very small, and you don't want to run your games off of a slower HDD, there is room for some limited expansion with an extra M.2 slot for adding a larger SSD in the future.

The Legion Tower 5 also comes with plenty of connectivity for all of your peripheral requirements with a total of 9 USB ports. Access 2 x USB 3 ports on the front panel of the case and 1 x USB-C, 2 x USB 3, and 4 x USB 2 on the rear of the PC. You're also able to wirelessly connect to the internet with its WiFi 6 and connect a plethora of devices with the built-in Bluetooth 5.1.

It's the end of the line for the NUC Extreme line, an Asus spokesperson confirmed to Fudzilla. making the NUC 13 Extreme the last of its kind. Asus, which took over the NUC line from Intel, has started making proactive changes to the NUC lineup and based on how things are looking like currently, the company trimmed this lineup down to NUC, NUC Pro and the recently announced ROG NUC.

This decision makes sense for a few reasons, one being the fact that ROG NUCs technically succeed NUC Extreme while having ROG-inspired designs, cooling and features. NUCs (whether it's made by Intel or Asus) devices are usually small, compact and well-packed with the best possible barebone options for different uses. The Raptor Lake-based NUC 13 Extreme looks anything but compact with desktop CPU options ranging between Intel Core i9-13900K, Core i7-13700K and the Core i5-13600K in an Intel Compute Unit with a triple slot for a graphics card and a lot more function inside its 14-liter case. In comparison, the ROG NUC looks more compact but relies on mobile graphics cards.

Asus has a prebuilt PC lineup including the 10-liter Asus ROG C22H with up to an  Intel Core i9-14900KF and RTX 4090 GPU while providing tool-free design. The NUC 13 Extreme is still sold through certain retail outlets depending in some regions. 

The State of Mini PC Barebone Market

The barebones market is competitive, but is fragmented in certain regions sold through local retailers and online regional sellers. This is where Asus has an advantage, as a company that sells globally. Since its takeover, Asus has been selling Intel NUC SKUs and covering its warranty. Now, it is inevitable Asus will begin upgrading the currently available NUCs with more variations. 

Meanwhile, companies like Gigabyte have Brix lineups and ECS has been making mini PCs for different types of users and industries, though none of them have gaming-specific barebones, yet. Zotac has been making barebones mini PC for many years, such as the Magnus One. 

Small form factor and embedded PCs specialist Shuttle Computer has launched a new barebones PC, ready for a 12th Gen Intel Core Alder Lake processor of your choice (up to 65W). The new Shuttle XPC Slim DH670 measures just only 190 x 165 x 43mm, and 1.3 liters capacity. It uses laptop DDR4 memory, and you can expand the storage using the two M.2 slots and one 2.5 inch drive.

One of the first things you will decide, if you take the plunge and buy one of these barebones, is your choice of processor. You are limited to a maximum of 65W TDP, to fit within the thermal capacity of the design. In other words this is the limit of Shuttle's heat-pipe cooling system with smart fan. That isn't the only restriction, you will also have to pick a processor with integrated graphics (so, not an F suffixed part). Having laid out those provisos you can still fit a chip with up to 16C/24T and which has Intel UHD graphics capable of supporting up to 4K/60P and up to four separate displays (2x HDMI 2.0b, 2x DP).

For memory you have two SO-DIMM slots for adding DDR4, up to a maximum of 64GB at 3,200 MT/s. Storage expansion comes via a single SATA 6.0Gbps interface for a 2.5 inch device, and an M.2 2280 (which we presume is a PCIe 4.0 x4 slot). One of the smaller M.2 2230 slots is present too, with a type E connector most commonly purposed for a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth card. This is the limit of the internal expansion options you will use, everything else, including the power, will dangle from one of the ports.

For its diminutive stature Shuttle has added quite a few ports to the XPC Slim DH670, both front and back. You can refer to the ports table below for exactly what is featured.

The unit is powered via a19V DC jack on the back panel. Shuttle provides a 120W PSU to plug into this in its barebones kit. Another feature of note is the twin RS232 connectors, most commonly used for serial connections (typically machinery still found in some workplaces.)

A couple of specs we haven't mentioned yet, that should be highlighted are the use of the H670 chipset from Intel, and the onboard Realtek ALC662/897/888S High Definition Audio solution. 

Shuttle hasn't shared any pricing details for its XPC Slim DH670 Alder Lake barebones but it says that it is "coming soon."  

The specs of the motherboard in Shuttle's new barebones appear at first glance to line up pretty closely to the Asus Pro H610T ITX which hits retail this week. However, a comparative inspection of thee small form factor motherboards shows the size and layout of the two boards varies quite significantly, and the port selection is different too. Shuttle's barebones aims more at "enhanced imagery in digital signage, design automation, kiosks, FIDS (Flight Information Display System), and other text- and graphics-intense applications." but this doesn't mean it can't be the home of your small form factor build.

NZXT, a company well known for its PC components and peripherals, entered the pre-built PC scene not so long ago. NZXT has decided to expand its pre-built line-up  of Streamer and Mini PC families with Base, Plus and Pro options.

Starting with the Streamer PC family, NZXT has decided to create a PC that would represent a perfect fit for every content creator out there, or as its name suggests, a perfect fit for streamers. As the company itself notes: "The Streaming PC is built for quality, entry-level streams. It's an excellent build for multi-tasking, editing, and video rendering."

The Streamer PC is powered by AMD's Ryzen 5 5600X processor with 6 cores and 12 threads, that can boost up to 4.6 GHz. To pair with the CPU choice, each Streaming PC version includes 16 GB of DDR4 memory running in dual channel configuration with 3000 MHz speed. For storage, there is a 1TB NVMe PCIe Gen 3 M.2 SSD. All of these components are housed on a B550 ATX motherboard. The difference between the Streaming base model, Plus, and Pro SKUs is the graphics card it ships with.

In the base model, you get Nvidia's GeForce RTX 2060 GPU, while the Plus model ships with RTX 3070. The Pro model is offering the strongest solution in form of an RTX 3090 graphics card. Pricing for the base, Plus, and Pro models is $1,599, $1,999, and $2,999, respectively.

Next up is the H1 Mini PC series of NZXT pre-built desktops powered by Intel's Comet Lake or Rocket Lake processors, depending on the SKU. Each of the three (base model, Plus model, and Pro model) SKUs are designed around a 13-liter enclosure that offers a small form factor gaming solution.

In the H1 Mini PC, there is also a dual-channel 16 GB DDR4-3000 MHz memory, complemented by 1TB NVMe M.2 SSD. The only difference between the three models is the choice of CPU and GPU. In the base model, you get Intel's Comet Lake design in form of a Core i5-10400F processor. That is paired with Nvidia's GeForce GTX 1660 Super GPU and all housed on a Z590I ITX motherboard. In the Plus SKU, you are getting an Intel Core i7-10700K Tray processor with GeForce RTX 3060 graphics, while the Pro SKU offers Intel Core i9-11900K CPU and GeForce RTX 3070 GPU. For pricing, NZXT offers base, Plus, and Pro models for $1,399, $1,799, and $2,499, respectively.

We've already seen Alienware's new Area 51 gaming desktop, but now the Dell subsidiary is announcing availability and pricing for the triangular systems.

The 2014 Area 51 desktop features a rather unique design, which is unlike anything we've previously seen. Of course, internally you'll find all the hardware you normally find inside a gaming PC (although perhaps a bit more high-end than the average rig), but you'll also notice a rather odd layout. The motherboard is rotated about 45 degrees, angling the rear I/O connectors upwards.

Inside the Area 51 there is room for up to three dual-slot graphics cards, water cooling, and up to 1500 W PSUs. According to Alienware, the triangular design aids cooling, as neither the front nor the rear of the case can be placed parallel to a wall, so airflow inwards or outwards is not restricted as much.

The case also comes with nine independent lighting zones, each of which has 20 different color options. You can control this through the Command Center 4.0 software, which also lets you monitor details about (among other things) your CPU, memory and graphics cards.

The Area 51 is built on the X99 platform, and it can therefore be configured with either 6-core or 8-core Intel Core i7 Haswell-E processors. You can install up to 32 GB of DDR4-2133 MHz memory, and graphics options go all the way up to three GTX 980's or two GTX Titan Z's, depending on your preference.

In addition to the launch of the 2014 Area 51, Alienware also announced that it is to become exclusive partners with Roccat. The AlienFX lighting will be coupled with the lighting on Roccat's peripherals, allowing you to control the lighting of your keyboard, mouse and PC all from one software interface. The updated software for this should hit around the end of November.

Pricing for the 2014 Area 51 systems starts at $1699, although if you're daring, you can easily configure the systems far beyond that. You can find the configurator here.

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Digital Storm announced the Velox custom gaming PC, a system built with two main design criteria in mind -- airflow and showing off the high-end components inside -- and on those counts, it looks like the company nailed it.

The Velox PCs will be available in four starting configurations, ranging in price from $2018 to $3750. The "Good" Level One system comes with an Intel Core i5-4690K processor, 8 GB of DDR3-1600 MHz memory, an Nvidia GTX 770, a 120 GB Samsung 840 Evo SSD, a 1 TB hard drive, an Asus Z97 motherboard, and a 750 W Corsair CX series power supply. Added up, that's a very adequate mid-range gaming system.

If you have the means, you will be able to configure the systems to carry up to an Intel Core i7-4960X Extreme Edition processor, 128 GB of DDR3 memory, more storage than you might ever need (how does two 6TB Seagate drives strike you?), and up to four GTX Titan Blacks or two GTX Titan Z graphics cards. 

Of course, the highlight of the Velox lineup is the custom-designed case. The motherboard is mounted on the left side panel instead of the usual right. We're not sure why Digital Storm opted for this, but a simple possibility is aesthetics -- it does have a certain appeal, and you'll be able to place the system on the left side of your desk and still look into the window and see all your precious components.

Another possibility is for cooling purposes, as the hottest components are mounted at the top of the enclosure. We’re not sure how big a difference it makes, but it might just help a little bit. If you choose to liquid cool your graphics cards, this will result in a gorgeous system as you’ll see the pretty side of the water blocks from above.

If you choose to leave your cards air-cooled, though, the “GEFORCE GTX” lettering on reference cards will be upside-down, and you’ll be more likely to run into problems with dust. Given this knowledge, it's apparent that Digital Storm wants you to liquid cool your components with a custom loop. The custom loops are made with EKWB and XSPC components, so you can rest assured that you’re getting quality hardware.

For airflow in the case, by default the systems come with “Standard Factory Chassis Fans”. No specifications are available, which is probably for a good reason -- you can upgrade these to Corsair AF-series fans, although that will cost you $99 for all six fans. You can also opt for LED-lit Cooler Master R4 series fans, which will cost you $59 as an upgrade. All things considered though, you can be certain that this system will be adequately cooled, so that doesn’t need to be one of your concerns.

You can build a system similar to one of these Velox rigs yourself, but to make one as beautiful will cost you some time and not an insignificant bit of skill. But could you do it for less money?

The systems are available to configure and order from Digital Storm today. 

UPDATE: Digital Storm has confirmed that the upside-down system layout is for cooling purposes, as it brings the graphics cards to an area with greater airflow.

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Origin likes high-performance PCs as well as 4K. In order to push 4K adoption a little more, the company has announced its new 4K < $4K Nvidia BattleBox Titan Z promotion.

The included lineups are the Chronos-Z series, the Millenium-Z and the Genesis-Z. The idea behind the 4K < $4K is that you can get a 4K-capable gaming system for just under $4000, but there's some very strange marketing going on here. The systems themselves aren't really all that remarkable beyond carrying a Titan Z, and we were already able to order these a while ago. The differences now, and why this is newsworthy, is because of changes to the branding and pricing. Previously, these configurations would easily cost in excess of $5000.

The three offers that Origin has in store for you are the following: a gaming PC equipped with a GTX Titan Z for less than $4000, that same PC with a 4K monitor for slightly more, and a deal where you pay the full price for that same gaming PC, but you get a second Titan Z for free. Doing the math, you’ll realize that you’re getting more hardware than you’re paying for. This might not be entirely clear for the first deal, but for the last deal it is; you’ll pay around $5500 for a system with two GTX Titan Z’s – in retail, two Titan Z’s alone will cost you about $6000, and then you’ve still got to buy the rest of the PC.

Of course, many of you will question the use of a GTX Titan Z in a gaming machine in the first place, let alone two, but you can’t deny that it is scary to see hardware being sold for less than it is worth. If you are in the market for a GTX Titan Z, this deal might be worth pouncing on since you’ll get very good value for your money.

One thing often forgotten about these systems is that many folks are willing to pay a little extra for the convenience of having a system built for them, along with a warranty on the entire system rather than on individual parts. They might not be for everybody, but there certainly is an audience for prebuilt gaming systems.

We're not entirely sure how Origin PC is financing this promotion. Either they have a deal with Nvidia, or they are taking a loss on purpose. A potential possibility is also that Origin PC bought up way more GTX Titan Z's than it sold, and that this is a way of getting rid of leftover inventory. We've reached out to Origin PC about this for comment.

On another note, Origin PC is also launching a trade-in program for Alienware-branded laptops from Dell. If you have one of these and wish to buy an Origin PC system or the new EVO15-S laptop, you can sign up for the trade-in program, and Origin PC will deduct the value of your old Alienware notebook from the purchase price of your new system.

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CyberPowerPC has launched a new SFF configurator for custom built PCs. For these systems, CyberPowerPC has options for the BitFenix Prodigy, the Corsair Obsidian 250D, the Fractal Design Node 304, along with a Fang BattleBox. Because these are all Mini-ITX cases, the systems also come with Mini-ITX motherboards. As a result, expansion options will be limited to a single graphics card, but for a small form factor system that's okay. These days, all the other hardware such as good sound cards and network cards are not necessary anymore as the onboard hardware is quite good.

For hardware configurations, there are plenty of options ranging from entry-level AMD systems to high-end Intel Core i7 configurations. There are more options for graphics cards than you will ever need as well. Be sure to check our Best Graphics Cards for the Money and Best CPUs for the Money guides while you're configuring a system for yourself. If you need more help picking components, you can check out our How to Build a Gaming PC Guide.

Getting a PC built by a company like this is a good option for those of you who are not as comfortable building a PC yourself but want to be able to pick specific components. It will cost you a little more, but you will also get a warranty on the entire system rather than only on individual components. CyberPowerPC ships the systems with a three-year warranty.

You can find the configurator in its different starting flavors at CyberPowerPC's website.

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CyberPowerPC, in partnership with Newegg, has built its EQ100. The company calls this PC an "Everyman Quad Core" system. While we don't agree that it is good for every man, it is certainly more than capable enough for many men and women.

The starting point for the system is an ATX-size gaming case. Not exactly a logical choice for a budget-oriented system on which you'll hardly be able to game, but it'll do the job as an enclosure. It is reasonable to assume that this is a case that CyberPowerPC was able to come by cheaply, which helps lower the final product price.

Inside this case, users will find a system built on the new AMD AM1 platform, which is a nice development to see. While you won't get monstrous amounts of processing power from the AMD Sempron 3850 1.3 GHz quad-core chip, it'll certainly be capable of performing everyday tasks such as web-browsing, emailing, and general media consumption. The AM1 platform is very efficient and cost-friendly; because of this we really like seeing vendors jumping onto it.

Completing the system, users will also find a single 4 GB DDR3 1600 MHz module along with a 500 GB hard drive and a single optical drive. Power is provided by a considerably more powerful than necessary 500 W power supply, though that does give users room to add a graphics card or more hard drives.

However, recommending that users buy a low-spec system such as this is difficult. You could build a similar system for around the same price point, and you'd gain a few more customization options. Despite that, pricing for this PC isn't all that bad if you consider what you get for it – a basic but complete system, including an operating system, a keyboard and a mouse.

Pricing is set at $299.99 with immediate availability.

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Origin PC, a manufacturer of custom-built computers, has announced a new addition to its compact Chronos series of gaming PCs – the Silverstone RVZ01 case.

The system, with this case, will be known as the Chronos Micro Tower, and according to the information we received, it will be able to house a GTX Titan Z. The problem with pairing these two together, though, is that you'd need a very powerful SFX power supply along with an alternate cooler for the GTX Titan Z, which occupies three expansion slots, one more than the case has room for. Silverstone has solved the PSU problem with the new 600 W SFX power supply (though the configurator lists a 650 W unit instead of a 600 W unit, perhaps that's just a mistake; we've reached out to Origin PC for clarification, but have yet to hear back) which might be tight, but should be enough to power a GTX Titan Z.

Regarding the physical size of the graphics card, we would have to assume that Origin PC has sourced an alternate cooling method for the card, be that with a compact air cooling unit or custom water cooling. It is possible to configure the two together online into a single system, though, and the press materials also make it very clear that it is possible. Again, we've reached out to Origin PC for more details.

"So far, 4K gaming PCs have been required to be in large tower cases with multiple video cards," said Kevin Wasielewski, Origin PC CEO and co-founder. "It's amazing to see that in such a short amount of time we are already offering a true 4K gaming PC in a micro tower that can sit vertically on your desk, or horizontally in your living room. The Chronos micro tower with a 12GB Nvidia Titan Z is the most gaming power I have ever seen in such a small chassis." 

Of course, we need not tell you that such a system will be very expensive, as the graphics card alone costs an additional $3313, where the starting graphics card in the configurator is a 1 GB GTX 750. As such, a reasonably balanced system will easily cost in excess of $5000.

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Shuttle has announced a new barebone PC – the DS81. This barebone PC is built to handle CPUs that drop into the LGA1150 socket, with TDP's of up to 65 W. Intriguingly though, the unit is unlike most other barebones – at just 43 mm thick. Wired to the CPU is an Intel H81 chipset, as well as two DDR3 SODIMM slots, allowing for up to 16 GB of RAM to be installed. In addition to these, to complete the barebone, users can install a single 2.5" hard drive or SSD, as well as two Mini-PCIe devices. The Mini-PCIe slots have support for mSATA drives.

Shuttle has built the unit to be more robust than traditional PCs, and also more resistant against heat. "The robust DS81 attracted a great deal of attention at CeBIT," said Tom Seiffert, Head of Marketing & PR at Shuttle Computer Handels GmbH. "The reliability of the model even at ambient temperatures up to 50 °C and under full load was clearly demonstrated live in Hannover." 

The system is also built to be permanently switched on, as it has a jumper onboard, which if enabled will ensure that the machine is always powered on so long as there is power. Furthermore, the unit also has a header on the rear I/O, which will allow you to wire a power switch to a remote location.

Front I/O is handled by four USB 2.0 ports, a card reader, as well as the standard set of HD audio jacks. Rear I/O connectivity is dealt with by a pair of two DisplayPort outputs, as well as an HDMI port, serial ports, a handful of USB ports, topped off with dual Gigabit Ethernet.

Pricing for the unit is set at €179 excluding taxes, which translates to about $240.

CyberPowerPC has announced a new series of pre-assembled PCs – the MEGA MINER series. This series of PCs is built with the purpose of scrypt-coin mining in mind.

The PCs will come in three models: the Mega Miner 100, 200, and 300. The cheapest model, the Mega Miner 100, is built using one of CyberPowerPC's own enclosures, and comes packed with an AMD FX-4300 CPU along with two AMD Radeon R9 270X graphics cards. Included is 4 GB of memory as well as a 500 GB hard drive.

The mid-tier model, the Mega Miner 200, is built using the same AMD FX-4300 processor, along with the same 4 GB of memory and a 500 GB hard drive. The difference comes in the graphics, as it carries a grand total of three AMD Radeon R9 280X graphics cards.

CyberPowerPC's top gun, the Mega Miner 300, is built using an Intel Core i3-4130 CPU, which comes wired to 4 GB of DDR3 memory along with a 1 TB hard drive. This machine comes packed with three AMD Radeon R9 290 graphics cards.

Both the Mega Miner 200 and Mega Miner 300 appear to be built using XFX's Type 1 Bravo PC enclosure. All three systems are built using one of Thermaltake's new PSUs, specifically of the DPS series, allowing users to interface with their power supply through software to monitor exactly how much power is being consumed, and more.

The Mega Miner 100, 200, and 300 are set to cost $989, $1929, and $2569, respectively. That said, we do feel that CyberPowerPC is a bit late to the bitcoin mining party…

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MSI has announced two new All-in-One PCs, the AG200 and the AG240, both part of the company's gaming line of products. These units are 21.5-inch and 23.6-inch machines, and both carry very similar hardware specifications. They can be equipped with either an Intel core i5-4200H or an Intel Core i7-4700HQ. They are also both built using a single Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M graphics card, and come with 8 GB of DDR3L memory out of the box. They also pack a single 1 TB hard drive, and have room for up to three more mSATA SSDs. Also present on both units is an 802.11a/c WiFi module that also has Bluetooth support.

Both have FullHD screens with multi-touch support, feature MSI's Anti-Flicker and "Less Blue Light" technologies, and are LED backlit. Connectivity is handled by one HDMI out port, one HDMI in port (for when you want to use the AIO as a monitor), three USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, a single network port, as well as the standard set of HD audio jacks. There's also a card reader. The bigger AG240 throws in a VGA port on top of the aforementioned array of ports. 

The units are currently being rolled out to shelves, with no word on U.S. pricing yet. European pricing of the AG240 is set at €1500, while the slightly smaller AG220 costs about €1150.

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Origin's Mini Cube With Big Hardware Specs

Even as mini-ITX cases appear to be getting bigger, microATX is getting smaller. The Rodney Dangerfield of form factors, microATX is often ridiculed by enthusiasts who just can't get enough room for high-end hardware and skipped over entirely by the crowd shopping for ever-shrinking form factors. The brief window of opportunity that microATX gaming cubes had to impress with their diminutive dimensions is all but forgotten, lost to the din made over slim little boxes housing GeForce GTX Titan cards.

But as anyone who built a PC using a cube-shaped enclosure will tell you, that probably shouldn’t have happened. The microATX form factor gives us four slots of expansion, enough room for at least four DIMMs, and space around the processor interface for an enthusiast-class voltage regulator. That’s because the ATX-sized upper portion of the motherboard remains, even after a microATX's platform's three bottom slots are trimmed off.

These days, the word compact seems to apply most specifically to mini-ITX-based boxes. But Origin PC finds a loophole in that theory by using BitFenix's Phenom M. Nearly an inch shorter in both length and height than the $2500 mini-ITX Performance Build we put together for our System Builder Marathon last year, the Phenom moves its power supply to the front, creating room for five expansion slots.

Origin PC took advantage of the Phenom's relatively roomy interior and stuffed its Chronos with two GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards, the fastest gaming boards Nvidia sells.

Those cards by themselves sell for about $1400, so Origin has a bit of justification for pricing its diminutive box at $4215. The extended warranty adds $269 compared to the company's baseline one-year plan, but Origin wanted us to include it as part of the company's package. For enthusiasts who'd rather let someone else hold the screwdriver, this is an affordable insurance of sorts.

Getting To Know Our Chronos

Flexibility is main reason enthusiasts like to build their own machines. It's also the reason why enthusiasts who get tired of building start going with boutique shops like Origin PC. You're smart enough to pick the parts for what you want to do, but for one reason or another want someone else to take responsibility for the workmanship inside and out. For this trip around the track, we asked Origin PC to pick parts for us.

Page one showed the front view of Origin PC’s chosen BitFenix Phenom M case, complete with its power and reset buttons, twin USB 3.0 ports, and audio I/O on the edge of its left side panel. But a look around back shows a few more reasons Origin might have picked this case from its customer-specified configuration sheet.

By removing the power supply from the rear panel, BitFenix shrunk the height of this microATX case down to about the size of an ATX motherboard, while adding top-panel fans and a fifth slot. As you can imagine, the space freed up by that extra slot could have come in handy paired to a microATX motherboard with a x16 slot in its last position, since it would have freed up space for a dual-slot graphics card. The Asus Maximus VI Gene chosen for this configuration doesn’t have that issue.

In fact, the only problem Origin PC encounters in this case is that its upside-down design lends itself to an anti-convective flow path. The company uses the top fans as intakes rather than exhaust, feeding its graphics cards with cooler outside air.

BitFenix designed its Phenom M to hold a radiator under the top fans, but that doesn't work when the case is packed with high-end graphics. With only fans mounted up there, you barely get one slot of width between them and the second GeForce GTX 780 Ti.

Origin PC also had to block off one of the case’s other features to add a 2 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM hard drive with 64 MB cache. The mount supports either two 3.5” drives or two 120 mm fans, and builders who don't want to use either of those options will also find mounting holes for a single 200 mm or 230 mm fan. But where are the 2.5” bays?

Two 2.5” SSD bays are located behind the motherboard, on the left side panel. Origin PC packed a $600 Samsung 840 EVO 1 TB SSD into the middle bay.

Other noteworthy parts include the Origin Frostbyte 120 cooler, a custom component that makes it harder for cost-counting readers to calculate the cumulative worth of this machine's parts versus its final price. The pump cover looks strikingly familiar, though. Aside from fan selection, we’re sure the same cooler manufacturer supplies a retail version in this size.

Origin PC Tweaks The Chronos For Better Performance

Origin PC is more than a skilled system builder; it’s also great at branding. Beyond the case's logos, the CPU cooler, and an included black T-shirt, the company’s Nexus software is a logoed version of the Xfire gaming client.

The tweaks extend to Origin PC's work with Asus' motherboard firmware. Its overclockers increased the multiplier range of Intel’s 3.5 to 3.9 GHz Core i7-4770K to 4.2 through 4.7 GHz. Adaptive voltage mode makes its 1.325 V setting a maximum, where the actual voltage reported by CPU-Z under eight threads of AVX-optimized Prime95 pushed it to only 1.28 V.

It's important to us that the systems we review be representative of what our readers get as well. Originally, Origin PC's website showed a 4.4 GHz maximum overclock available to customers. Then it was 4.6 GHz (still 100 MHz under our review machine). We talked with company representatives, though, who let us know this was a typo and should have been 4.7 GHz all along. As of this writing, you should be able to configure a Chronos through Origin's online configurator that exactly matches the beast cranking away in our lab.

Origin PC also gets its logo on EVGA’s vaunted Precision X overclocking utility, which it uses to push those two GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards to a 1026 MHz base clock rate, a 1078 MHz GPU Boost setting, and GDDR5-7400.

Origin PC doesn’t charge for graphics card overclocking, but does cover the cost of replacing parts if anything goes wrong. Its $269 free-shipping warranty extension to three years is starting to look more like a bargain.

Test Settings And Benchmark Configuration

Origin PC’s overclocks look fairly impressive, so we took a few screen shots to prove them. Though CPU and GPU frequencies are particularly high, the firm stuck with the DRAM’s XMP configuration.

By including some of our older benchmarks, we’re able to compare Origin PC’s $4215 machine to our five most recent “top builds”. We’re working on some benchmark updates, but it will take some time before we once again have a collection of same-setting data across five systems.

Results: 3DMark And PCMark

Futuremark's 3DMark shows the significance of putting two GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards in SLI alongside a 4.7 GHz CPU. Our former $2550 build is solidly defeated. Then again, a $4215 machine should be able to do that, right?

Unable to fully utilize the $2550 machine's extra CPU cores or take advantage of the AVADirect machine’s RAID 0 array, PCMark 8 doesn’t allow any of these systems to stand out. Even worse, one of its tests didn’t work with two different sets of drivers for the GeForce GTX 780 Ti cards, leaving us with only the Work and Storage scores to contemplate.

Results: SiSoftware Sandra

Did you remember that our own $2550 System Builder Marathon machine from the third quarter of 2013 had a six-core CPU? Sandra does. The same machine chews through math much faster than the highly-overclocked Chronos.

Lenovo's Erazer has the same six-core Sandy Bridge-E-based CPU. However, a less aggressive overclock puts it within striking distance of Origin PC’s much more-tuned quad-core Chronos.

The six-core machines also have quad-channel memory controllers. Among the machines with two memory channels, the Chronos enjoys the advantage of DDR3-1866 CAS 9.

Results: Battlefield 3

None of those older machines were tested with Battlefield 4 (it wasn't even out yet), so the previous-gen version of this title stands in until more data can be collected.

The biggest problem we run into (and this would likely be something that'd affect Battlefield 4, too) is the 200 FPS cap. Resolutions not bottlenecked by graphics instead make it look like the dual-GPU machine is leaving performance on the table. Our value charts aren't going to like that at all.

The Chronos is roughly 50% faster than our $2550 System Builder Marathon system in Battlefield 3 at triple-monitor resolutions, where the 200 FPS cap has the least impact on average frame rate.

Results: Far Cry 3

Low to medium resolutions again conspire against the dual-GPU builds, this time in Far Cry 3. Both configurations pull ahead when we test using triple-screen resolutions, at least.

The things we said about our High Quality settings in Far Cry 3 become even more apparent when we shift up to the Ultra Quality preset. Origin PC's pair of GeForce GTX 780 Tis turn a loss at 1920x1080 (to our SBM setup) into a decisive win at 4800x900 and 5760x1080.

Results: F1 2012

Frame rates in F1 2012 are typically bottlenecked by either the CPU or DRAM, and both of those bottlenecks can be exacerbated by the mere presence of extra graphics cards. With all results exceeding 100 FPS, the High quality preset isn't demanding enough for us to squeeze useful data from these machines.

Even the Ultra quality setting doesn’t stress these GPUs enough to get a big boost from SLI or CrossFire. The Chronos wins by a small margin at 5760x1080 over AVADirect’s single-card configuration.

Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

After applying more patches than a NASCAR team jacket, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is finally able to get some use from extra CPU cores and Nvidia's SLI technology. Even then, the game’s High Quality preset has difficulty pushing past the limits of AVADirect’s quad-core CPU and single GPU. Stepping up to a resolution of 5760x1080 puts Origin PC on top.

The Ultra preset is where Origin PC's Chronos makes its stand in this game, outpacing our second-place in-house System Builder Marathon machine by more than 10%.

Results: Audio And Video Encoding

Our Apple iTunes and LAME benchmarks are single-threaded, so the most efficient architecture operating at the highest clock rate wins. Naturally, at up to 4.7 GHz, Origin PC's Chronos wins.

On the other hand, our HandBrake and TotalCode Studio benchmarks are well-threaded, so we expect the six-core System Builder Marathon and Lenovo builds to jump into the lead. 

A combination of the Sandy Bridge-E architecture and a conservative overclock cause the Lenovo system to be overtaken by Origin PC, though. The mediocre overclock our SBM machine achieved is barely any better.

Results: Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe After Effects appears to scale according to clock rate, except for the overclocked M8-based system, which appears exceptionally slow. Our workstation editor identified a bottleneck in QuickTime as the culprit.

Photoshop enjoys more speed-up from the six-core Sandy Bridge-E-based CPU in Lenovo's X700 and our $2550 machine. On the other hand, the weaker graphics subsystem in those systems struggles with OpenCL-accelerated filters.

Premiere splits the difference between more cores and higher clock rates, placing Origin PC’s quad-core processor on par with our own System Builder Marathon creation. Acrobat, on the other hand, prefers frequency alone.

Results: Productivity

All of our productivity-oriented benchmarks are well-threaded, but 3ds Max also shows a slight preference for the newer architecture of the quad-core builds. The result is that the two six-core machines take smaller wins in this application.

Results: File Compression

Though most of our file compression benchmarks appear to favor four-core CPUs based on more modern architectures, 7-Zip stands apart by receiving at least some benefit from the SBM and Lenovo build’s older six-core processor.

Power And Heat

Quad-core processors typically use less power than six-core models, and the systems in this comparison based on quad-core chips enjoy the additional advantage of leveraging newer architectures and more advanced manufacturing. But an extra graphics card affects the Chronos' average power consumption. The same issue affects our $2550 System Builder Marathon machine, which also stumbles under the draw of a six-core Sandy Bridge-E-based CPU. At least it serves as a sturdy space heater during cold winter benchmarking sessions.

We measured the thermal output of our dual-GPU configurations from the hotter card, though none of the boards exceeded the capabilities of their fan maps. The CPUs on the Origin PC and AVADirect boxes run surprisingly warm by liquid-cooling standards, particularly when the overclocked Lenovo machine pushes the heat of six cores into a similarly-sized radiator.

Average Performance Versus Efficiency

The Chronos' average gaming performance only tops our System Builder Marathon setup by 5%, but that’s primarily because we threw in a bunch of medium-resolution tests. Battlefield 3, for example, is capped at 200 FPS and completely wastes the tiny PC's massive graphics power.

The costliest computer in this comparison, Origin PC’s Chronos also has the highest performance. Its graphics cards unfortunately have a negative overall effect on efficiency, which means the machine could only become more efficient if the average workload had a higher GPU-performance bias.

But hey, at least its efficiency tops that of our System Builder Marathon machine.

Can A $4000+ Gaming Cube Still Deliver Value?

When we equate performance with money, our past build experiences lead us to expect roughly $.50 in gains for every $1 spent. But even that sounds like a pretty tall order for a system priced out to $4215. Or is it?

For 2.75 times the price, the Chronos only gains 17% over our own ASRock M8 build. But that’s not even in the same class! More appropriately, the Chronos provides 2.4% more overall performance than our $2550 System Builder Marathon machine, for 66% more money. Even if the warranty is worth 15% of its cost, that's just not right. And that’s because overall performance really isn’t a fair way to rate Origin PC’s machine.

Half of our game data, which we collected across several different machines at a variety of price points, is taken at either too low of a resolution or detail level to properly illustrate the difference between a mainstream graphics card and two of the highest-end boards you can buy in SLI. And the Chronos is a specialty gaming machine, not an overall performance pleaser like our Sandy Bridge-E-based $2550 build or the workstation-gone-Trekky machine delivered by Lenovo. High-end gaming is the only true measure of the machine’s worth.

Compared to our $2550 build, that same 66% price increase gets the Chronos a 29% gaming performance lead. We’ve come to expect a 2:1 cost-to-benefit relationship in high-end hardware comparisons, so we might have expected a 29% performance gain to cost 58% more or so. Yet, Origin PC’s build quality and warranty are easily worth the 8% difference between expected and actual price differences.

Performance-at-all-costs buyers who want a compact PC with as much graphics performance as possible need no further justification to spend their money on this exact system. Where else could one find a Core i7-4770K able to spin up to 4.7 GHz and two overclocked GeForce GTX 780 Ti graphics cards protected against failure for three years at any cost? Given the luck-of-the-draw associated with scalable Haswell-based CPUs, simply hitting those frequencies is reason enough to be impressed.

You don't take time to ask "at what." So maybe I was a little groggy at the Origin PC meeting, but it was Chris' meeting. I was just there to shake a couple hands when the command to open shutters came down. And when I finally opened my photos, this is what I found:

Origin PC has designed its Millennium ATX tower with an invertible, reversible motherboard tray. And when the company wants to show off, it can even mount the tray both reversed and inverted. But those options are primarily designed to alter airflow and component clearance to best fit a custom build. In addition to those features, the case is also modular.

Anyone who bought a super-elite Millennium mid-tower as a starting point and later decides he wants to progress to the extra-super-elite Genesis full-tower, can buy a base to house either a pair of triple-fan radiators or fourteen hard drives.

We could go on about the other Millennium/Genesis features such as its space for quad SLI on any ATX motherboard that supports it, the smart fan controller and remote control, the alternative radiator mounting spots on places we'd like to call top and front panels (depending on motherboard orientation), or the dual-hinged door that swings both directions, but none of us would want to sound like we have PC envy.

Pick Your Own Parts...And Have Someone Else Build For You

Wouldn’t it be great if you could build your own PC with a few clicks of your mouse, with near-perfect precision? Tom’s Hardware's editorial team, made up of enthusiasts, spends most of its time writing stories for the do-it-yourself power user crowd. Sometimes we forget that a great many of our readers want to pick the parts for their next machine, but don't necessarily have the time or will to piece everything together. Shoot, I even know a professional IT guy who accidentally messes up several systems a month as a result of Intel's delicate LGA interface.

If you're looking for customization without the challenge, risk, or inconvenience of setting everything up on your own, than a boutique builder is probably your best bet. They're the folks who apply skilled hands to one-off configurations. And among those companies, AVADirect offers a vast array of top-end hardware and an extremely talented staff. But the company decided to go even further to prove that its custom-built machines could challenge both the quality and the value of our own efforts.

So confident is AVADirect in its quality and value that it even applied a chrome-like finish to the chassis holding the system we're reviewing today—that's a $99 AVADirect-exclusive option that doesn’t even show up in performance-to-price calculations—in addition to providing three years of parts and labor coverage and lifetime technical support.

The PC we received was extra-custom, sporting three internal drives. That's notable, since AVADirect's online configuration tool only lets you pick two; you need to call in to add the third. At first, that 2 TB Western Digital Black repository didn't even appear on our parts list. Including it plus the two SSDs is what got us up to $2470. But we needed all of that hardware to make this setup comparable with the two machines we're using as competition today.

We also had to calculate the price using a different cooler of similar value, since the Seidon 120M in our sample wasn't yet available through AVADirect's online configurator. We used the slightly-more-expensive Noctua NH-L12, so the price of this specific configuration could drop a bit in your own shopping cart. Again, though, both configuration exceptions can be solved by calling AVADirect and ordering that way.

The Hardware: Inside AVADirect's Mini Gaming PC

Listed under AVADirect's Mini Cube Gaming PC category, this configuration starts with Lian-Li’s PC-Q28B. If you'd rather lose the black parts, you can order the PC-Q28A instead and still access the custom finish options.

Lian-Li doesn’t offer its cases in chrome, and chroming the case’s ultra-fine brushed finish would have destroyed that look. AVADirect instead applies a chrome-like vinyl film with a pressed-in brushed texture.

AVADirect does a remarkable job of covering the case’s surfaces, taking special care to wrap edges and remove port openings. Though vinyl wrap isn’t costly, the value of this $99 option comes from the time involved in applying the covering.

A premium build should support the highest-end media formats, so AVADirect included LG’s BH16NS40 Black 16x/16x/48x BD/DVD/CD Blu-ray burner with our sample. This $138 option also includes a brushed finish, though the lighting required to make it shine would have turned the case wrap into a photograph-dooming reflection. A retail boxed part, the LG drive adds CyberLink Media Suite 10 to the package.

Seasonic’s 80 PLUS Plantinum-rated 760 W fully modular power supply blocks the view of other internal components. Though this PSU offers much more output than the system needs, a Platinum rating assures optimal efficiency results.

Modular power cables make it easier for us to pop out the power supply for a look inside. AVADirect fits this build with a Core i7-4770K processor, a GeForce GTX 780 from Asus, and Kingston’s XMP Beast-series DDR3-1600 C9 16 GB dual-channel memory kit.

AVADirect Does Overclocking

AVADirect doesn’t specify an overclocking option in its Web-based configuration tool, but the company's techs will overclock your system if you ask them to. In light of the custom cooling and drive configuration only available via phone call, this configuration necessitates talking to a representative anyway. Might as well request a tune-up at the same time.

The company didn’t force a manual voltage increase, but instead set a fixed 42x multiplier and let the motherboard manage voltage levels. The result is a mild speed-up that persists under multi-core loads rather than clocking down—as specified by Intel—with a core voltage ranging from 1.15 to 1.25 volts.

We’ve found that 1.25 V is roughly the voltage limit for the Core i7-4770K (at least in our motherboard reviews). Additional voltage leads to increasingly quicker thermal throttling. Then again, when we're evaluating platforms, we aren't using a closed system with an internally-venting graphics card either. Although AVADirect’s overclock is consistent through most of our benchmarks, eight threads of Prime95, compiled with AVX support, quickly cause it to throttle back.

There aren’t any special settings tied to the mild overclock, but AVADirect does save a copy of its changes to one of the motherboard’s overclocking profile registers.

GPU overclocking is often more difficult to manage, so the company leaves Asus’s original GeForce GTX 780 frequencies alone. Though it contributes to CPU heat and occasional thermal throttling, the internally-vented graphics card also is largely responsible for a sub-32 dB full-load noise level and 22 dB of idle noise, both calculated to one meter.

Test Systems And Benchmark Configurations

It's been a long time since we had perfect systems to compare against each other. So, I chose a trio of machines to represent the spectrum of comparison points. Our recent $2550 System Builder Marathon configuration comes closest to AVADirect’s price, the ASRock M8-based setup is closest to its size, and Lenovo's Erazer X700 is the only factory-built model with data points in the same set of benchmarks.

Though Nvidia's graphics cards also support Surround mode, StarTech's MDP2DVID DisplayPort-to-dual-link DVI adapter gives us the flexibility of even higher resolutions in the future, without the need to buy new displays. The adapter also enables 3D Surround mode with our current 5760x1080 configuration.

Results: 3DMark And PCMark

Boasting a trio of GPUs, the System Builder Marathon box plows through 3DMark, leaving no margin for lesser-equipped machines to compete. Although 3DMark scores aren't always representative of real-world gaming, it's a compelling finish in favor of a very gaming-oriented system purpose-built to tear up our benchmark suite.

PCMark surprises us by showing little gain in storage performance for AVADirect’s RAID configuration. Larger SSDs operating on their own fare better in the storage suite.

Results: SiSoftware Sandra

AVADirect’s overclock beats the tweak we applied to ASRock's M8 barebones platform in Sandra, despite the fact that both PCs employ the same CPU. Naturally, hexa-core processors enjoy an advantage, but by far less than theory would have us expect.

The secret behind Kingston’s “XMP Beast” kit is that it's little more than an aesthetically upgraded set of mainstream KHX1600C9D3/8GX modules. They're even reported as such by CPU-Z.

Results: Battlefield 3

AVADirect delivered a gaming machine to us, so we'll set aside the synthetics that bloviate the importance of triple-GPU arrays and six-core CPUs, looking instead to real-world metrics that relate to what you have installed on your own machine. After all, we often find that games are unable to utilize more than four cores.

Of course, at this point you're probably playing Battlefield 4. We're in the process of collecting data with as much hardware as possible to make the switch for comparisons like these. In the meantime, though, we leverage benchmark numbers already generated in our taxing Battlefield 3 sequence.

High details are needed to make the $2550 System Builder Marathon PC’s three-way graphics setup shine in Battlefield 3. AVADirect’s more diminutive system proves itself sufficient, but nowhere near as fast.

Results: Far Cry 3

The System Builder Marathon machine I built continues to flex its triple-GPU muscle in Far Cry 3, though we see apparent CPU bottlenecks at 1600x900 and 1920x1200. AVADirect’s tiny box can't sustain playability under the duress of Ultra presets at 5760x1080.

Results: F1 2012

Several of our articles show that F1 2012 is usually bottlenecked by either CPU or memory performance. This appears to be more latency- than bandwidth-dependent, as the Core i7-4770’s superb dual-channel controller pushes the two smallest systems into the lead. High resolutions help AVADirect’s GeForce GTX 780 put the squeeze on the 760 in our ASRock M8 build.

Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is often limited by processor performance, but higher resolution and detail levels help AVADirect’s configuration nudge our own ASRock M8-based configuration out of the way. Unfortunately, the Mini Gaming PC is no match for a System Builder Marathon box almost three times its size.

Results: Audio And Video Encoding

Our audio transcoding apps are single-threaded, so the Core i7-4770K’s superior Haswell architecture shines. From there, AVADirect’s higher overclock results in a lead over the ASRock M8-based build.

We expected the six-core chips in our SBM system and Lenovo's box to convey a huge advantage in our well-threaded video transcoding tests, but that didn't happen. The AVADirect and ASRock systems don't lose by much.

Results: Adobe Creative Suite

AVADirect’s machine takes a win in After Effects, which favors plenty of memory per core. However, its Core i7-4770K doesn't do as well in our CPU-oriented Photoshop benchmark full of threaded filters. Fortunately for that system, our GPU-based Photoshop test, built using OpenCL-accelerated filters, loves its GeForce GTX 780.

Rendering in Premiere Pro is another well-parallelized task, so naturally the six-core CPUs in our System Builder Marathon box and Lenovo's machine perform best.

Printing a PowerPoint presentation into PDF format, on the other hand, only uses one core. The most efficient architecture is at an advantage, and because AVADirect enables the highest clock rate, its machine takes the top spot.

Results: Productivity

Our productivity-oriented tests are dominated by titles optimized to take advantage of as many cores as possible, which is why the Sandy Bridge-E-based processors win out over the more modern quad-core designs. The losses aren't severe, but we shouldn't be surprised to see Haswell beaten.

Results: File Compression

Four out of our six file compression benchmarks, consisting of 7-Zip, WinRAR, and WinZip, prefer Sandy Bridge-E's additional CPU cores, nudging the System Builder Marathon and Lenovo boxes into a lead. Both Haswell-based boxes gain ground in two of our WinZip tests.

Power, Heat, And Efficiency

AVADirect’s Mini Gaming PC leverages the Haswell CPU architecture to turn less energy into heat, but so does our own ASRock M8-based build. Its GeForce GTX 780 graphics card also pulls around 100 W more than the 760 in our barebones M8.

Both the baseline M8 and factory-overclocked AVADirect configurations push Intel’s Core i7-4770K to its thermal throttling point. The overclocked M8 was fixed by reversing two of its fans, but the system was always far noisier than AVADirect’s Mini Gaming PC.

Using the average of all systems as a baseline, the comparison of power to performance shows that AVADirect’s machine produced 5.8% better-than-average performance using 17.8% less-than-average energy, for a 28.8% above-average efficiency rating.

AVADirect's Mini Cube Gaming PC Offers Objective Value

AVADirect’s three-year warranty is long enough for our liking, but does require you to send the system back for support. The firm pays the return shipping bill, but a lower overall cost and the price of downtime leads us to value the protection package at around 10% of the complete system. The bundled operating system factors in as well; it's worth about 4% of the system price. So, any of our builds, which don't include warranties or software, need to beat AVADirect's submission by at least 14% to make up the difference.

When overall performance sets the benchmark, AVADirect’s choice of hardware does provide better value than our own System Builder Marathon configuration. The system we pieced together using ASRock's M8 barebones platform lands even higher on the value scale, but only because it’s also in a lower performance bracket. Moreover, AVADirect is able to match computing giant Lenovo in this regard.

The value of AVADirect’s mini gaming machine only falters in games at high resolutions. Our $2550 System Builder Marathon setup packed three graphics cards specifically to address this discipline. Lenovo also calls its Erazer X700 a gaming machine, though its creation takes last place in high-resolution gaming value.

When we tabulate the scores, calculate the value, and take a critical look inside AVADirect's Mini Cube Gaming PC, we see that the company is fully capable of building a quality machine without compromising value. Factoring in warranty coverage and a bundled operating system to the cost, it appears that we're getting hours of assembly labor nearly free. That sounds like a bargain specifically for anyone who lacks either the time or skill to replicate a boutique builder's efforts.

Is Lenovo's Erazer X700 The Perfect Gaming Workstation?

Lenovo’s products are most familiar to mobile and business users. But the enthusiast segment is tougher to crack. To begin with, many of us prefer configuring our hardware choices, dialing in an optimal balance between complementary components. Those of us with more money than time are typically willing to pay specialized boutiques to build those very custom PCs. But the business strategy that bore Lenovo's Erazer is very unlike those boutiques it needs to contend with.

The X700 we have in our lab isn’t your grandma’s Aptiva, and Lenovo hopes to set it apart from those office-inspired systems with a gaming-inspired exterior. Inside, the Erazer still looks like the IntelliStation that likely hatched her, however, with a workstation-oriented motherboard and processor you would expect to find in the firm’s ThinkStation line. Thankfully, Lenovo complements its gamester chassis with a real gaming graphics card and some headroom for overclocking.

Observant enthusiasts will note that the Core i7-3930K is really best-suited for work duty, since most games max out around four cores. Less expensive LGA 1150-based processors offer higher IPC (instruction per cycle) throughput, lower power consumption, and fit onto more affordable motherboards. But Lenovo’s platform offers sixteen lanes of PCI Express connectivity to two add-in cards if you’re itching to support upgrades, and its combination of extra RAM and storage could make it the all-around winner that our previous System Builder Marathon $2550 machine tried to be.

Getting To Know Lenovo's Erazer X700

The Erazer X700 comes factory-configured to a 3.9 GHz overclock, which is tied to a function button between the power button and front (top) panel ports. Singular USB 2.0, USB 3.0, headphone, and microphone jacks are available in the same vicinity.

Behind the front panel, there’s a USB 3.0 drive dock with an extra power connector. I hoped to find an exact match on the company's website, but Lenovo doesn’t show this angle on any of its external drives. A snap-on cover prevents dust from collecting inside the port, but also keeps the spring-loaded top panel door from closing all the way.

A full view of the back panel reveals how the top door remains partly depressed when dust covers are on the ports. The Wi-Fi card and I/O panel can also be seen from this angle.

The Wi-Fi antenna folds down and rotates 90° to each side. The I/O panel features six analog stereo jacks, optical and coaxial digital audio, six USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, and a GbE connector.

The Erazer X700 front panel door opens to reveal five 5.25” and one 3.5” bay. The 3.5” bay is filled with a so-called 25-in-1 card reader (multiple versions of five standards), while two of the 5.25” bays include dual-format (2.5” and 3.5”) hard drive trays. Between those, Lenovo adds a PLDS (Phillips Lite-On Data Storage) 12x Blu-ray burner that system documentation mislabels as a Blu-ray reader and DVD writer combo drive.

A multimedia keyboard and programmable-function gaming mouse are included, along with mouse software, mouse weights, documentation, and AMD’s current Radeon HD 8950 gaming bundle certificate.

Inside Lenovo's Erazer X700

Lenovo uses a mid-weight sheet steel case and card bracket to prevent damage during shipping, along with extra-thick flexible foam packaging and a double cardboard box.

As a prosumer, I used to get terribly upset when I'd open a full ATX system and find a microATX motherboard inside. Improvements in on-board components have made add-in cards less necessary for most gamers, however.

The biggest problem we spot is that the single-band 802.11n Wi-Fi card must be removed to facilitate a CrossFire upgrade for the included Radeon HD 8950 graphics card.

No amount of packaging can completely protect the motherboard from the impact of a heavy CPU cooler in shipping, so Lenovo uses an unbranded version of Intel’s BXRTS2011LC closed-loop liquid cooler. Both the Intel and Lenovo solutions are manufactured by Asetek, and the 1.5” radiators that accompany them are halfway between Asetek’s 550LC and 570LC factory-configured options.

One problem of liquid cooling is that its remote fans no longer blow onto voltage regulator components. Lenovo solves this issue by adding a standard 60 x 10 mm fan and partial shroud over its PWM heat sink. We’d need something like Antec’s SpotCool to accomplish this task in our own builds.

More Erazer X700 Features

Filling the top hard drive tray, Samsung’s venerable 830-series 128 GB SSD offers up to 520 MB/s reads and 320 MB/s writes.

Though limited by rotating disk technology, Seagate’s 7200.14 series Barracuda 2 TB drive offers 64 MB of cache on a 6Gb/s interface to aid transfers to and from high-capacity storage.

Though there are a few exceptions, most X700 models come with 16 GB of RAM. Lenovo keeps its specs open to multiple suppliers, and these DDR3-1600 samples come from Hynix.

The X700 supports Intel’s full range of LGA 2011 processors plus overclocking and dual-card graphics arrays, which is a pretty tall order for typical OEM power supplies. Rated at 625 W, AcBel’s 80 PLUS Gold-certified FS8003 provides two six-pin and two 6+2-pin auxiliary PCIe connectors, and should hold up to most compatible upgrade options. If you need additional leads, you also probably need greater power capacity.

AcBel doesn’t list this part, and it doesn’t appear under the vendor name at the 80 PLUS website. We instead had to look at Lenovo-specific parts to find its 80 PLUS Bronze rated predecessor.

Lenovo Software

The Erazer X700’s motherboard includes Reatek’s high-end ALC892 audio codec, but Lenovo doesn’t license DTS-Connect or any of the codec’s other added-cost features. It does include PowerDVD 10, though.

CyberLink’s Power2Go usually comes in a low-cost combo deal with its PowerDVD software, so Lenovo includes that too. Once again, notice that burning software detects the drive of this X700 as a BD-R, even though system documentation does not indicate write capability for this format.

As with most tier-one PCs, the X700 includes a recovery partition to restore its original software state. But Lenovo also includes system recovery software, which lets you back up the entire contents of a drive.

The delivered configuration’s 2 TB of additional storage could come in handy for backing up an SSD, though  you can also pick external storage to back up any of the installed drives.

Return Of The Turbo Button

The Erazer X700’s overclock button works with software to modify firmware. The button did not function for us when we tried to make changes using a different system drive. Changing the drive with Overclocking enabled caused it to remain enabled, and changing the drive with Overclocking disabled caused it to remain disabled.

Multipliers range up to 43x, which should be viable at the default overclocked voltage, as long as the mid-sized cooler’s liquid temperature is low. We found power throttling to be an issue, rather than thermal throttling, with the system drawing around 341 watts from the wall while fluctuating between 4.1 and 4.3 GHz.

We collected benchmark data using Lenovo’s default overclock of 3.9 GHz at 1.4 V. These parameters can be changed in BIOS, but the settings don’t stick unless they’re applied by the software application.

We wanted to try a lower overclock voltage to overcome power throttling, but software limitations thwarted that effort. Though firmware allowed increases from 0/256s of a volt and 25/256s of a volt over stock, those settings don't persist through a reboot.

We were also unable to play with RAM settings. The X700's firmware has memory ratios corresponding to DDR3-800 through DDR3-1600, but its timings menu isn’t selectable.

Test Systems Configuration

Many enthusiast builders aren't sure what standard memory is, believing that DDR3-1600 CAS 9 applies. Even though we believe JEDEC should have standardizes that data rate at CAS 9, the council initially took a more conservative approach at CAS 11. Most large manufacturers have stuck with that original spec for backwards compatibility, and its not surprisingly found in this Erazer X700 sample.

By now, you're probably wondering why we never reviewed the Radeon HD 8950. This "new" card follows AMD’s "by any other name" marketing tactic, and is identical to the Radeon 7950 3 GB we reviewed almost two years ago, except for its the name. Even after the rebrand, the performance of AMD’s high-value 7950 is still pretty sweet.

AMD's 7000-series Radeons required DisplayPort for a third monitor up until recently. Though many options exist, StarTech's MDP2DVID DisplayPort-to-Dual-Link DVI adapter gives us the flexibility of resolutions beyond 1920x1080 on that output, and without the need to buy new dual-interface monitors to support those higher resolutions in Eyefinity.

Results: 3DMark And PCMark

The System Builder Marathon $2550 machine was built to excel in both games and productivity applications, so a bunch of its money went towards three-way SLI. It was also overclocked a little further than Lenovo’s Erazer X700, so it makes a clean sweep of 3DMark.

The $1300 PC was configured to be a mid-grade desktop that excels in games, so its budget was also skewed towards graphics. It achieves a higher graphics score in 3DMark, but its Physics score is sub-par, even compared to my own ASRock M8 review.

PCMark is primarily limited by hard drive performance, though this recent version puts a little more emphasis on the rest of the system. The $1300 to $1535 machines still perform well, in spite of lower host processing core counts.

Results: SiSoft Sandra

The SBM $2550 PC uses the same CPU as Lenovo’s Erazer X700, yet still outperforms it in Sandra Arithmetic by a fairly wide margin. The X700’s 3.9 GHz overclock performs roughly the same as the $2550 PC’s baseline, with XMP memory as its primary differentiating factor. Some manufacturers automatically enable fixed-ratio Turbo Boost mode when XMP is enabled.

To keep a processor within its rated power envelope, the amount of frequency Turbo Boost applies is supposed to decrease as the number of loaded cores increases. Enhanced Turbo sets a fixed boost frequency at the CPU’s highest rated frequency, which for the Core i7-3930K is 3.8 GHz.

Memory performance coincidentally scales in proportion to price. The expensive systems have quad-channel memory controllers, while the mid-priced builds are stuck with two channels.

Results: Battlefield 3

Lenovo’s Erazer series is supposed to be designed for gaming, yet its single Radeon HD 8950 lags behind the $1300 build’s GeForce GTX 770. With a potent Sandy Bridge-E-based six-core, 12-thread CPU, the Erazer X700 instead appears better-suited to general-purpose enthusiast-class computing.

Results: Far Cry 3

The $1300 System Builder Marathon machine’s stronger graphics configuration continues to emphasize its gaming theme in Far Cry 3, with Lenovo’s stronger CPU offering little extra performance.

Results: F1 2012

F1 2012 applies an easy-to-handle load on nearly every enthusiast-level graphics card, instead getting bottlenecked by processor or memory performance. Higher resolutions and detail levels provide a little more differentiation between systems, but the weakest card in the group is still capable of smooth game play at 5760x1080.

Results: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Lenovo’s high-value enthusiast graphics card continues to struggle against the $1300 PC’s more expensive 3D subsystem in Skyrim. Although this title struggled to scale early in its life, subsequent patches smoothed out processor performance. Nevertheless, The X700's six-core CPU provides little to no benefit over the $1300 machine’s four cores.

Results: Audio And Video Encoding

This iTunes benchmark is single-threaded and favors high frequencies and efficient architectures, so the quad-core CPUs found in our $1300 SBM and M8 builds complete the task more quickly. Similarly, LAME MP3 shows that many desktop-oriented workloads still aren't optimized for workstation-class processors (though LAME can be threaded by running multiple transcodes simultaneously).

HandBrake and TotalCode Studio are optimized for multi-core processors, and bestow notable leads on the X700 and $2550 SBM PC.

Results: Adobe Creative Suite

Adobe After Effects shines a bright light on the performance of six-core CPUs complemented by plenty of memory, with Lenovo’s Erazer X700 matching our own $2550 System Builder Marathon effort at stock frequencies.

Threaded filters similarly favor well-threaded PCs, though Photoshop’s OpenCL acceleration doesn’t appear to like AMD’s GPU. The application also spurns the $2550 SBM machine’s SLI configuration.

Though it's included in Adobe’s Creative Suite, Acrobat is more of an office application. Perhaps it's fortunate, then, that our PowerPoint-to-PDF print task is only single-threaded, gaining nothing from the added complexity of a six-core CPU.

Results: Productivity

Our productivity suite is really well-suited to workstations, and it heavily favors high core counts. We see Lenovo’s Core i7-3930K matching the -3930K used in our SBM project at stock speeds.

The $1300 System Builder Marathon machine stumbles in Visual Studio, showing that there's a very real-world benefit to the Hyper-Threading and additional L3 cache featured on Intel's Core i7 processors, even based on the same architecture.

Six-core processors in Lenovo's Erazer and our $2550 SBM PC enjoy a fairly narrow advantage, though it is worth noting that the more complex CPUs operate at lower clock rates and employ less efficient architectures than the quad-core ASRock M8 and $1300 SBM builds, so their win is still impressive.

Results: File Compression

Our 7-Zip and WinRAR benchmarks get only a little boost from the Core i7-3930Ks in Lenovo's Erazer and the $2550 SBM machine, though higher clock rates and more modern architectures in the comparison builds play a role in narrowing the gap.

WinZip results are all over the map so to speak, with clock rate the most consistent advantage across all disciplines. The $1300 PC has the most OpenCL-friendly GPU, but the OpenCL-accelerated workload appears to favor the M8 build’s Haswell-based Core i7.

Power And Heat

Quad-core Haswell-based processors consume far less power than Intel's hexa-core Sandy Bridge-E design, even at idle, making the cheaper machines appear more energy-friendly. The $2550 System Builder Marathon system's three graphics cards also consume copious wattage, placing Lenovo's Erazer X700 in the middle of this chart.

The Erazer X700’s closed-loop liquid cooler outshines the priciest SBM build's big heat sink, even though large heat sinks consistently place well against closed-loop configurations in our most recent round-ups. Lenovo applies more voltage to achieve its overclock. But high temperatures, even after opening up our chassis, made it easy to blame a mediocre CPU sample for the $2550 machine’s heat woes.

Overall Performance And Efficiency

Even though some of us weren’t around in the days of the old turbo button, we still remember seeing it on cases many years ago. And we learned that everyone left this button engaged all of the time; switching it off would force lower clock rates otherwise. We believe the same thing will happen with the Erazer X700’s Overclock button, so we used that configuration as the baseline for comparisons.

A CPU overclock doesn’t do anything for the X700’s value-oriented enthusiast graphics card of course, but the performance benefits are easy to see in other benchmarks. Unfortunately, the $1300 System Builder Marathon configuration is a significantly faster platform for gaming.

Zeroing out the scale in the chart above so that nothing is shown to be more than 100% efficient, we see that the Erazer X700 becomes far more efficient when its overclock is disabled. That’s probably because Lenovo pushes the CPU to 1.4 V when it's tuned up.

Haswell-based machines are slower, yet consume so much less power that they take big efficiency leads.

Performance Per Dollar

We expect to pay a premium for Intel’s six-core platform, so we can't get too upset to find the Erazer X700 with a Core i7-3930K processor breaking well past $2000. In fact, at $2300, it’s still cheaper than our top System Builder Marathon effort sporting the same CPU. The big difference, of course, is that machine also sports a complex graphics configuration to boost gaming performance. No doubt, this will become an interesting value debate.

Our own overclocked machine barely edges out the value score of Lenovo’s Erazer X700, and the situation is even close to par at stock settings. But our system also didn't include an operating system, keyboard, mouse, or tech support. Heck, we didn’t even include the cost of shipping. With Windows 8 OEM priced at $90 and any kind of tech support worth at least $100, Lenovo’s Erazer X700 is actually a better overall value than our high-end DIY build.

One of the problems associated with evaluating a complete system based on overall performance is that many of our benchmarks don't benefit from the Erazer X700’s six-core CPU. And the system’s enthusiast-oriented graphics card doesn't win it much love in games, particularly compared to multi-GPU arrays. Lots of GPU horsepower allowed our $1300 PC to beat the X700 in overall performance, and no set of added features can offset a 77.7% value difference.

Coming to a positive conclusion about either one of the $2000+ machines' value propositions would require us to limit ourselves to looking at applications optimized for more than four cores.

But Is The Erazer X700 A Gamer?

The overall value rating on the previous page is really only important if you're looking for a multifunction performance-oriented PC. Lenovo is marketing its Erazer X700 as a more gamer-oriented box, though. When we get that specific, its high-end six-core CPU is an extravagance. But is that value-oriented, still-fairly-high-end graphics card a limitation?

Though AMD’s Radeon HD 8950 is a good card for most single-screen resolutions, it’s not exactly a powerhouse in Eyefinity. And though a few failed runs might not impact the majority of gamers, a $2300 system isn’t designed for the majority of gamers; it's intended for the top tier of folks who know what balance means, and that when you pair an almost $600 CPU with a $250 graphics card, frame rates are going to suffer. That this system fell behind our $1300 System Builder Marathon PC at the same quality settings means that gaming isn't really what the Erazer is best at.

The truth about Lenovo’s Erazer X700 is that it’s a home workstation that games well, rather than a purpose-built gaming powerhouse able to handle professional tasks during the workday. Huge storage capacity, Blu-ray burning flexibility, and a workstation-class CPU would have made this the perfect excuse for me not to visit the computer lab back in my university days, and I believe that a large number of today’s power users will find the Erazer X700 similarly suits their needs.

If we were to give Lenovo one piece of advice to wrap things up, it'd be to put a bigger emphasis on graphics performance, and perhaps dial back the CPU to save some money. Those six x86 cores, overclocked, don't further the X700's gaming mission, while a second Radeon HD 8950 in CrossFire would have really bolstered our gaming benchmarks.

MSI has updated its AG2712 All-in-One gaming PC, and has also released the AG2712A. The new model features a number of aesthetic changes as well as a small number of hardware changes.

The hardware changes that have occurred include a different GPU, as well as an alternative storage configuration. The GPU in the unit is now an AMD Radeon HD8970M, and the storage is now configured with two 128 GB SSDs in a RAID 0 array, with a 2 TB HDD for mass storage. The SSDs that are used are made by Plextor.

Other specifications include the unit featuring an Intel Core i7-3630QM Processor, a 27" Full HD 10-point Multi-Touch LCD panel, up to 16 GB of DDR3-1333 SODIMM memory, Wireless 802.11n, and a Blu-Ray burner, all of which are wired to an Intel HM77 Express chipset.

The unit also features two HD audio ports, two USB 2.0 ports, four USB 3.0 ports, HDMI in and out, VGA out, one Gigabit Ethernet port, and a 3-in-1 card reader. The unit can also be mounted to a wall, as it has support for the VESAIII standard.

MSI's new AG2712A All-in-One gaming PC is slated for a late-August release in Europe, with no official word on US or global availability.

So far we've seen two manufacturers implement the new $900 AMD FX-9590 5.0 GHz 8-core CPU in their systems, and now Origin PC has also added the CPU to its list of options. The AMD FX-9590 is a 32 nm Vishera silicon, with eight processing cores, a base clock speed of 4.8 GHz and a turbo clock speed of 5.0 GHz. That said, while it might be priced at $900, you cannot actually buy it, as it seems that it is only available to OEMs.

The FX-9590 CPU is available in the Origin Genesis PCs, which have a starting price of $1,551. When configured with the FX-9590 though, its default starting price is $2,321. If the CPU is overclocked to feature a base clock speed (not to be mistaken with the stock Turbo clock speed) of 5.0 GHz, it will cost $2,371.

If ordered now, the system can be expected to leave the factory in the beginning of August.

Stealth.com has introduced a new Mini-PC, one that is fanless and will feature an Intel Core i7 CPU. The PC is primarily aimed at industrial applications, as can be seen by its robust build as well as the I/O connectivity options. The unit will be called the "LPC-700F."

The LPC-700F ships standard with the Intel Core i7-3610QE CPU, which might be a mobile part but is still quite powerful. It also features a standard 128 GB SSD as well as 4 GB of DDR3 SODIMM memory, both of which are upgradeable.

Connectivity is handled by two audio ports, four USB 3.0 ports, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, HDMI, DVI and VGA ports, as well as a stunning six COM ports. The unit features an external power supply.

"Our new Stealth Model: LPC-700F is the most powerful and technologically advanced fanless PC we have introduced to date. Our full featured machine features built in PCI or PCIe expansion card slots for applications requiring additional expansion capability. Stealth's LPC-700F is a powerful diminutive computer that operates without noisy cooling fans that could draw in dirt and dust potentially causing catastrophic failures. Stealth's fanless computers are encapsulated in a rugged extruded aluminum chassis performing as a heat sink to dissipate heat build-up," said Ed Boutilier, CEO of Stealth.com Inc.

The LPC-700F fanless industrial computer is already available at Stealth.com at a starting price of $1,995.00.

Logic Supply has announced its new ML250 fanless industrial system. It is a system based on the Mini-ITX platform, and it can carry up to Intel Core i5 processors.

Since it is built for industrial applications, it will offer a series of motherboard and daughterboard options with features such as serial ports and handfuls of Ethernet ports that target industrial customers. The processors that can be equipped are the Intel Celeron B810, the Core i3-3120ME, or the Core i5-3610ME. Memory can be configured up to 16 GB of DDR3-1333 memory, split over two DIMMs. Numerous options for storage and operating systems are also available.

Other customizations such as mounting systems, assembly service, testing and warranty can also be hand-picked to your liking.

The systems are also "designed to be redesigned," meaning that the enclosure itself can also be tailored to cater to the wishes of different industrial customers. Possibilities are wide and include changes such as front I/O displays, screen printing, and labeling the systems with company logos or images.

The units are currently available for pre-order on Logic Supply's website. Prices start at $772.96, which according to Logic Supply, is notably cheaper than competing units which can run for prices well above $1,000 for similar configurations.

Digital Storm has announced the new lineup of Virtue prebuilt gaming PCs, all of which currently feature Intel Haswell CPUs. The units are designed to be a bit smaller than the other ultra-tower offerings from Digital Storm, as well as competitors, yet still pack a good punch. It looks like the case Digital Storm has chosen to use for the Virtue PCs is the Corsair 350D -- a high-performance Micro-ATX enclosure. As such, the enclosures have room for up to five fans as well as a 240 mm radiator and are still quite stylish. They can also house up to two graphics cards, two hard drives and four SSDs.

The entry level model will feature an Intel Core i5-4570 CPU, 8 GB of memory, a GTX 660 graphics card, Corsair H60 CPU water cooling, a 120 GB Corsair SSD and a 1 TB hard drive. It will cost $1,448. The highest model, before any customization, will cost $3,128. This one will pack an Intel Core i7-4770K CPU, a GTX Titan graphics card, 16 GB of DDR3 memory, Corsair H100i liquid cooling, a 1 TB hard drive and a 240 GB Corsair SSD, as well as a Blu-ray drive.

The units are already available on Digital Storm's online webshop.

iBuyPower has announced that the GTX 780 is now part of its lineup of options for its gaming desktops. The graphics card sports 2304 stream processors, 192 TMUs, 3 GB of GDDR5 memory that runs at an effective speed of 6.0 GHz over a 384-bit memory interface, as well as support for the Boost 2.0 technology.

“We always stay on the forefront of performance, and equipping our systems with the latest graphics technologies allows us to give our customers the best possible experience,” said Darren Su, Co-Founder and VP of iBuyPower.

Systems equipped with the GTX 780 graphics card start at prices of $1,699 and can climb all the way to $2,999 for a system equipped with not one, but two GTX 780s paired with an Intel Core i7-3930K processor. You can find the systems here.

Since the release of AMD's HD 7990 Malta GPU, a number of manufacturers have released their own cards. Meanwhile, two system builders have also announced the option of the HD 7990. The prices of these options are slightly above that of AMD's MSRP.

The HD 7990 features two 28 nm Tahiti chips that are based on the GCN architecture, running at a base clock speed of 950 MHz with a boost speed of 1,000 MHz. In total, the cards each have 4096 stream processors, 256 Texture Mapping Units (TMUs), and 64 Render Output Units (ROPs). Each of the GPUs has 3 GB of GDDR5 memory dedicated to it, bringing the total memory on the 7990's PCBs to 6 GB. The memory runs at 6 GHz, which goes over a 384-bit memory interface.

So far, it is unclear whether either Origin PC or Maingear include the eight free games that come along with the retail version of the HD 7990, although Maingear does mention that it ships with Crysis 3, BioShock Infinite, and Tomb Raider.

Moreover, it also remains unclear whether Origin PC will be liquid cooling the card. Since EK released a water block for the 7990, it is very likely to also be an option on select systems, although it wasn't officially announced.

The HD 7990 options can already be selected for those who are interested.

Digital Storm aims to end the debate between building a PC by yourself, or just buying a pre-assembled system. What Digital Storm did was to configure a machine, and then compare their price to that of exactly the same components from Newegg. In the end, the smallest difference in price was just $23; the biggest difference was $58. They mention that at this amount of difference, the decision is a no-brainer. This lineup of machines will be known as the VANQUISH systems.

The VANQUISH systems will always be pre-tested for at least 72 hours. Digital Storm will always keep an inventory of completed systems ready to ship out right after an order is placed so that you don't have to wait for the system to be built and tested.

"When we decided to take on the DIYers we knew we had to offer impressively built systems that could compete in terms of performance as well as price. For just $23-$58 more [we] were giving customers a fully optimized system featuring the latest chipset platform and next gen-graphics. This allows them to focus on demolishing the competition instead of worrying about the reliability of their PC," said Rajeev Kuruppu, Digital Storm's Director of Product Development.

Foxconn is releasing a lineup of smaller desktop PCs, the NanoPC 7000 series. The NanoPC will come in three different versions: the AT-7300, AT-7500, and AT-7700.

All three machines are nearly identical, with the exception of the processor. All of the units carry an Intel HM76 chipset, use only the integrated HD4000 graphics, support up to 16 GB of DDR3 1,600 MHz memory, and has a single 2.5" SATA3 drive bay. The machines carry two USB 2.0 ports and four USB 3.0 ports, HD audio ports, DVI and HDMI, Gigabit Ethernet, SPDIF oudio out, and a six-in-one card reader.

The CPUs that the units come with include the Intel Core i3-3217U, the Core i5-3317U, and the i7-3517 for the AT-7300, AT-7500, and AT-7700, respectively. These are all dual-core parts intended to be used in Ultrabooks.

The units should hit the market any moment now, and while there is no official word on U.S. pricing yet, EU pricing is set the range from €410 to €650.

It was at CES last summer that we first heard about MSI's upcoming all-in-one gaming computer, and ever since then there have been many little details seeping out of the rumor mill. Now MSI has released its AG2712 Gaming All-in-One PC.

Packing a 27" 1080p matte display, and supporting up to 10-point multitouch, the machine certainly shows promise as an all-in-one PC. To quench the (light) gamer's thirst, MSI has equipped the AG2712 with a mobile Core i7 CPU and Nvidia GTX 670MX graphics, which packs 3 GB of graphics memory. System memory is handled by 12 GB of DDR3 memory, expandable to 16 GB. Storage is taken care of by a 1 TB 3.5" hard drive in combination with a 128 GB SSD.

Lastly, MSI has opted to give the AG2712 a 2 megapixel front camera, two 5-watt speakers, a Blu-Ray optical drive, a 3-in-1 card reader, four USB 3.0 ports, two USB 2.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, the standard headphone jacks, VGA and HDMI out, and most impressively, an HDMI in port. The last allows users to plug in their PS3 or Xbox 360, or any other HDMI compatible device, and use the computer as a big screen.

So far there has been no word on US pricing, although European MSRP pricing is expected to be between €1899 and €1999. The AG2712 All-in-One Gaming PC will hit European shelves just prior to the end of April, with no official word yet on U.S. availability.

Habey's Pro-6820 embedded system features a rather striking orange and grey aluminum and steel enclosure that measures just 9.45" x 9.96" x 4.46" and is rated for operating temperatures ranging from -30°C to 70°C. The system is based on Intel's HM77 chipset and supports a maximum of 8 GB of DDR3 RAM (via two SO-DIMMs) and 3rd Generation Intel Ivy Bridge Quad Core i3, i5 and i7 processors.

The system includes a plethora of I/O options including two USB 3.0 slots, four USB 2.0 ports, two PS2 connectors, an externally accessible 8-bit GPIO port and 2.5" HDD bay, four COM ports and 6 LAN connectors. With regards to display output, the Intel Integrated HD Graphics is capable of delivering a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1536 over the VGA port and 1920 x 1200 through the DVI-D connector.

Though the Habey Pro-6820 is currently in production and ready for order, we've yet to receive any specific information on pricing and availability.

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Origin PC has announced that it has added the 900D chassis to the GENESIS lineup of desktop systems. Earlier we saw Digital Storm build a machine housed in the Obsidian 900D. Now Origin PC has joined the club.

Origin PC claims that the 900D is the ideal enclosure for any hardware enthusiast since it offers room for up to nine hard drives, two power supplies, four graphics cards and a ridiculous amount of water cooling expandability.

In the GENESIS lineup, the 900D makes it possible to mount up to five radiators, liquid cooling for the CPU and all the GPUs, and mount up to four GeForce GTX Titans. In addition, Origin PC offers a custom paint job executed with automotive paint.

"The Corsair 900D is a perfect addition to our GENESIS line of high-performance desktops. With plenty of room for upgrades and support for up to 4-WAY SLI Liquid-Cooled TITANs, the GENESIS 900D is the ideal solution for any hardware enthusiast," said Kevin Wasielewski, Origin PC's CEO and co-founder.

Pricing starts at $1,430.

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Shuttle, a manufacturer known for making small PCs and barebones, has released a new passively cooled system. It will be called the DS47, and will be announced during the upcoming Computex from June 4 through June 8, 2013.

Packing an Intel Celeron 847 CPU and a NM70-chipset, the device should work as a basic media center. The CPU will be clocked at 1.1 GHz and carry a built in HD2000 graphics chip. As is the standard, the unit won't carry any memory, but buyers have the option of filling the two DDR3 slots with two 8 GB DIMMs, creating a total of 16 GB of DDR3 memory. Users can also plug in SSDs to the mSATA slots.

External connectivity is achieved by using four USB 2.0 ports, two USB 3.0 ports, two COM ports, a card reader, two Gbit Ethernet ports, an HDMI port, and a headphone and microphone jack.

The entire system measures 200 x 165 x 39.5 mm and weighs just 2.05 kg. Furthermore, it has a built in VESA mount for mounting behind monitors.

So far, there has been no official word on pricing, but we can expect a price of around $200.

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Giada has launched its new D300 barebone system aimed at a number of different markets, among them home use, office or even industrial. 

Regarding specifications, the device supports Intel's Mobile Ivy Bridge i3, i5, and i7 CPUs that can drop into the HM77 Express chipset, though only chips with a maximum TDP of 35 W are supported. The on-die HD4000 in the mobile Ivy Bridge chips will take care of the graphics. Furthermore the unit features two SODIMM slots allowing for a total of 16 GB of DDR3-1600 memory.  Besides this, the unit features two Mini-PCIe slots, one of which is capable of supporting an mSATA SSD. Next to these, the unit has space for a single 2.5" drive.

Connectivity is via what looks like a total of six COM ports (two on the front, four on the rear I/O), dual Gbit LAN, HDMI, DVI, VGA, six USB ports (four USB 2.0 on the rear I/O and two USB 3.0 on the front), and HD audio connections. Lastly, there's two PS/2 ports next to a 12 V power-in port. Most sources make no mention of the COM ports on the rear I/O, but the rendered images clearly show four of them. There should also be a version of the D300 without COM ports for those who don't like the legacy look. Internally, you'll find a single SATA power with power, another three COM ports and a single USB 3.0 port.

The D300 comes with a built in WiFi module and antennas, as well as the possibility to connect a Bluetooth interface and an IR port. Buyers will also find a VESA mounting system for mounting the unit behind TV's or monitors. The unit is also just 236 mm by 182 mm by 50 mm in size.

Pricing will depend on the configuration chosen.

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The AE2212 and the AE2212G both feature a 1920 x 1080 LED backlit anti-glare panel, over which an optional touch screen film can be placed. The optional touchscreen would be 10-point multitouch.

MSI's new AE2212G/AE2212 comes standard with Windows 8, which in combination with the touchscreen, could provide a good computing experience. While most displays have corners that are inaccessible for fingers, MSI's new 22" All-in-One PC is frameless. Thus users can slide their fingers right over the corners, making the system a lot more accessible.

Both the AE2212G and AE2212 ship with Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs, have a couple of USB 3.0 ports, and come with a mouse and keyboard. They also come with a built-in 1 TB 3.5" drive and 802.11b/g/n wireless. They weigh just over 10 KG (about 22.74 lbs) and both support the 75 x 75 mm VESA standard as an option. Lastly, the unit also has an HDMI in port, allowing users to utilize the computer as just a display as well.

The AE2212 will use the CPU's integrated graphics, while the AE2212G will carry an Nvidia GT630M 2 GB graphics card.

Availability will start in Europe by the end of March, with no word on U.S. availability at the time of writing.

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