Posted 08/15/08 at 02:00:00 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
IBuypower’s Gamer Paladin 990 is a strange beast. After we completed our testing, we were left wondering just what iBuypower was trying to accomplish with its half exotic, half midrange rig.
Take, for example, the videocard situation. The machine sports a pair of Nvidia’s newest GPUs, but not the company’s top-end offering, the GeForce GTX 280. Instead, iBuypower uses a pair of EVGA GeForce GTX 260s. If these GeForce cards weren’t midrange when they were first released, they certainly are now, as Nvidia has taken a blowtorch to prices to keep the GTX 260 competitive with ATI’s Radeon HD 4870.

Full review after the thing.
Posted 07/11/08 at 03:58:23 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
There’s a civil war brewing within the PC: Intel says the CPU is the head honcho while Nvidia argues that the GPU is boss. With its Deluge-i A2, Puget shows whose side it’s taking in this debate. This budget gaming box spends big on the videocard but skimps on the processor.

Did they side with the right team? Find out after the jump
Posted 06/18/08 at 05:39:51 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
For all those readers who have added up the price of the parts in an OEM box and screamed into the night air: “Hell, I can build it cheaper than that!” CyberPower has a retort: Beat this one, sucker! While you might think you’re up to the challenge, we suspect the price-to-performance ratio of the CyberPower Gamer Ultimate SLI Quad is impossible to match—unless you’re using boosted parts. In fact, we’re not sure how CyberPower is making a profit off this stacked and packed rig.
Posted 04/04/08 at 05:28:37 PM by Gordon Mah Ung
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Can you get Ferrari performance for the price of a Camaro? That’s the question we asked when we uncrated Falcon Northwest’s small formfactor FragBox II. Falcon, the recognized father of the modern gaming PC's, normally throws us lustworthy $9,000 gaming rigs. At $1,500, the FragBox II is no such home wrecker.
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Posted 01/14/08 at 04:44:12 PM by Nathan Edwards
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January 2004. DirectX 9 had just shipped. SCO had begun its ultimately futile crusade against IBM. And Hypersonic’s brightly colored Sonic Boom, featuring Intel’s newest processor, was smacking our benchmarks around.
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Posted 01/09/08 at 06:33:49 PM by Nathan Edwards
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Our first thought upon opening AVADirect’s new Core 2 Duo SLI Gaming System was, “Wow, this is heavy.” Our second, “Oooh, but it’s pretty!” was followed shortly by a third, “It’s bleeding!” A cursory inspection revealed that the system was shipped without one of its two CPU-cooler hose clamps, and was indeed leaking AVA’s “bloody red” coolant into the machine. Disconcerting, to say the least. We notified AVADirect of the problem, and they dispatched a tech to fix it. Thereafter, despite some red residue on one of the 8800’s DVI ports, the rig worked perfectly.
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Posted 11/05/07 at 08:09:51 PM by Nathan Edwards
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Boom. Boom. Boom. The 800-pound gorilla has arrived. Dell’s latest XPS system, the 720 H2C, packs some serious power and plenty of extras, but its balls-to-the-wall approach doesn’t completely overshadow its proprietary roots.
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Posted 10/22/07 at 08:00:55 PM by Michael Brown
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Label us Luddites for resisting Windows Vista, but there’s no arguing the point that the new OS currently offers very little you can’t get faster with Windows XP. That goes double for games, which is why we’re baffled by HP’s decision to run Vista Ultimate on the groundbreaking Blackbird 002 gaming rig it sent us.
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