We’ll be the first to admit that system benchmarking has gotten downright boring in the last couple of years. It’s been a solid year and a half of Core i7-980X/990X procs followed by a year of Core i7-2600K rigs. Yawn, seen it.

We certainly can’t say that about Digital Storm’s latest Black Ops HailStorm. It’s the first machine to grace our Lab with Intel’s Core i7-3960X, so we were anxious to see if the new chip could actually walk the walk. We know from our testing of the chip in a controlled environment that it’s a bad mother, but what about when it’s in a high-end system and it’s being run against a slew of other super-fast rigs?

Cybernet has been building all-in-one touch-screen PCs for hospital and medical use for years. Given the ambitious specs of the company's new iOne-H5—a 2.93GHz Core i7-870, 8GB of memory, and ATI's Mobility Radeon HD 5730 GPU—we found ourselves wondering if this long-term expertise would translate into an awesome consumer system.

You want to know a secret? Building a high-end PC on an unlimited budget ain’t that hard. You just click the "Bestest" button and add to cart. What’s hard is building a PC on a strict budget. Do you sacrifice CPU, GPU, or storage? Do you cheap out on the case or the PSU?

So when WarFactory decided to ship us its Immortal budget box instead of the usual shoot-for-the-moon rigs we test, we thought it would be interesting to see how the more modest PC would measure up.

Perhaps you’ve heard about our concept for the Velcro PC: a computer so small, light, and unobtrusive that you could literally affix it to the back of your HDTV.

That concept might have finally arrived in Giada’s i50 PC.