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.

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.

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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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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