Posted 11/19/09 at 09:30:37 AM by Paul Lilly

To kick off it's tenth anniversary, boutique system build iBuyPower has launched its second-gen Chimera 2 gaming system. Like the original, the follow-up act sizzles on stage with a fiery exterior, but with a "completely redesigned signature Chimera Inferno II Chassis."

The color scheme now wraps around the entire chassis, with the chimera flame design covering 4 exterior surfaces (front, right, left, and top panels). Underneath it all sits either a Phenom II X3/X4 or Core i5/i7 foundation, depending on which base configuration you start out with. The Core i5 base comes standard with a Core i5 750 processor, Asus P7P55D LE motherboard, 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory, an ATI HD 5750 videocard, 750GB hard drive, 700W PSU, 22X DVD burner, and Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. Surprising affordable, pricing starts at $1,100 (or $999 if building around AMD).

Don't feel like buying one? To celebrate its 10th birthday, iBuyPower said it's giving away a Chimera 2 system with a Killer Xeno Pro Gaming card.

"We are excited to be celebrating our tenth anniversary and wanted to thank all our customers that helped make it happen with a giveaway and hot new system," said Darren Su, VP of iBuyPower. "The Chimera 2 gaming systems are fully loaded and feature a new aggressive design sure to impress."

To enter, follow iBuyPower on Twitter and/or Facebook became a Fan of iBuyPower on Facebook or follow them on Twitter, and then fill out the contest entry form here. Good luck!

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Posted 11/19/09 at 08:00:21 AM by Paul Lilly

MSI on Wednesday announced it has begun shipping its new Wind Top AE2220 all-in-one desktop PC. The AE2220 takes its place as MSI's flagship all-in-one and expands the company's fast growing Wind Top series.

"The MSI Wind Top is an awesome all-purpose family PC. Share photos, edit videos, play games, watch HD video -- our Ion graphics processor means you can have it all," said Drew Henry, general manger for Ion and GeForce products at Nvidia.

In addition to the Ion platform, the AE2220 boasts an Intel Core 2 Duo T6600 processor clocked at 2.2GHz (Pentium dual-core T4300 also available), a 21.5-inch multitouch display, 4GB of DDR2-800 memory, a 500GB hard drive, optional Blu-ray player, 1.3MP webcam, built-in 6-in-1 card reader, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, two mini-PCI-E expansion slots, IR receiver, and Windows 7 Home Premium.

The new all-in-one is still a no-show at most retailers, though Amazon still has it listed for pre-order for $700.

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Posted 11/18/09 at 09:00:37 AM by Paul Lilly

Move over Alienware, Voodoo PC, Hypersonic, Maingear, BFG, Widow PC, Falcon Northwest, Velocity Micro, Vigor Gaming, Apple (sike!), Overdrive PC, Digital Storm, and any other vendor of high-end gaming PCs we may have left out, and make way for Origin, the newest custom gaming PC maker on the block.

Origin makes its debut with a pair of flashy looking systems, the Genesis desktop and EON18 notebook. To set the systems part, Origin has teamed with Killer Paint to offer custom paint jobs and airbrushed designs, including custom requests. Cost of entry for the desktop starts at about $1,600 for an AMD Phenom II-based system, $1,700 for Core i5, or about $2,000 to jump up to Core i7. That buys you a 750W Corsair power supply, EVGA GTX 260 videocard, 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory, a 320GB hard drive, and a few other odds and ends.

Hit the jump to see what else Origin has in store and what prominent figure gives the vendor his thumbs up.

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Posted 11/18/09 at 09:00:00 AM by Gordon Mah Ung

When Falcon Northwest submitted its Talon PC to us instead of its top-gun Mach V, we didn’t think the machine stood a chance of taking down the spate of ripping-fast 4GHz Core i7 rigs we’ve seen in the last few months.

And we were right. But the point Falcon was trying to make with its Talon was that its machine could deliver 90 percent of the performance of those big LGA1366-based Core i7 rigs at half the cost, half the noise, and half the energy consumption. Impossible? We thought so.

But that was before we’d ever heard of ATI’s new Radeon HD 5970 card. Code-named Hemlock, this new card features not one, but two of the GPUs that power the Kick Ass Radeon HD 5870.

Read on for the full review!

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Posted 11/18/09 at 08:30:13 AM by Paul Lilly

A little prerequisite reading is in order. If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out Lloyd Case and Gordon Mah Ung's article covering ATI's Radeon HD 5970, a videocard we've dubbed "The Undisputed Performance Champ." Once you read through that feature, you'll be in a better position to appreciate the awesome power that comes from cramming two HD 5970 videocards into a CrossFire X configuration, and that's exactly what Maingear has done.

The boutique system vendor today announced the immediately availability of said cards into its Shift PC. By doing so, Maingear says gamers are afforded 10 teraflops of pixel pushing power when enhanced with the company's Redline technology.

"The Maingear Shift was designed specifically to harness the incredible amount of GPU power that is on the horizon," said Wallace Santos, CEO and founder of Maingear. "The ATI Radeon HD 5970 truly ushers in a new era of everyday supercomputing for the consumer. Besides having a total of 3200 stream processors each for an incredible gaming experience, with Windows 7 and DriectCompute, these cards can be used to accelerate everything from video editing and transcoding to advanced photo manipulation."

As we previously reported, the Shift can be configured with either an Intel P55 or X58 foundation, and you can outfit either one of them with a pair of HD 5970 videocards. All that power doesn't come cheap, however, and you'll be looking at about an additional $1,500 over the base configuration, which includes an Nvidia GeForce GTS 250.

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Posted 11/16/09 at 07:00:00 PM by Norman Chan

It's that time again! This month, we've priced out an amazing $1500 gaming PC. If you recall from our Dream Machine feature, the $1500 "Budget Surplus" of mid-2009 was powered by a Core i7-920 and Radeon 4870 X2. Today -- a few months later -- we're able to make a few adjustments to upgrade to a Radeon 5870-based machine. The introduction of Intel's Lynnfield processor, increasing RAM prices, and the final retail release of Windows 7 also forced us to reevaluate our spending priorities, but we're very pleased with the outcome. As gamers, this is a system we'd be proud to build ourselves, and will play any game released in the foreseeable future. 

Read on for our parts picks, and let us know what you think!

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Posted 11/13/09 at 11:30:07 AM by Paul Lilly

If the Mac Mini and a bag of Skittles were to share a night of unbridled love, we're pretty the love child of such an affair would look identical to the Zino HD, Dell's new line of colorful low-power home theater PCs.

Dell kicks off the HTPC line with several base configurations, each one built around an AMD processor. The least expensive  Zino HD starts at just $230 and includes an AMD Athlon 2560e processor (1.6GHz, 512KB L2 cache), 2GB of DDR2-800 memory, 250GB hard drive spinning at 7200RPM, integrated ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics, 2.1 audio, an 8X DVD burner, and Windows Vista Home Basic. The OS is a bit of a surprise, considering each of the three other configurations come with Windows 7 Home Premium in 64-bit trim.

The highest priced model checks in at $650 and kicks the processor up to an AMD Athlon 2850e (1.8GHz, 512KB L2 cache), doubles up on memory (4GB), adds twice as much storage (500GB), tosses in an ATI Radeon HD 4330 videocard with a 512MB frame buffer, and includes a 20-inch Dell ST2010 widescreen monitor.

All of the models come with 4 USB ports (2 each on the front and back) and 2 eSATA ports.

The Zino HD is available now through Dell.com.

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Posted 11/04/09 at 07:45:16 PM by Gordon Mah Ung

It is, perhaps, fitting that Velocity Micro’s new rig is called a Raptor. That’s because anyone who has ever seen the Air Force’s F-22 Raptor in person and on afterburner knows just how overkill the F-22 is.

The same can be said of Velocity Micro’s Raptor Signature Edition. With people overjoyed just to have a $99 Athlon II X4 620, Velocity Micro decided to go shock-and-awe on the spec lists—and the wallet.

First up is Intel’s stellar Core i7-975 Extreme Edition. With a stock speed of 3.33GHz, Velocity Micro uses a custom CoolIt Domino ALC to get the processor to a very stable 4.2GHz. To “balance” this $1,000 CPU, Velocity Micro throws in probably $1,500 in GPUs in the form of three EVGA GeForce GTX 285s. Still not impressed? How about four SLC-based Intel X25-E Extreme 64GB SSD drives in RAID 0?
 
Mind you, these are not the pedestrian X25-M consumer drives; they’re enterprise-class drives that offer more than twice the write performance of the X-25M version and peg the read speeds at the SATA 3Gb/s limit. If you’re afraid of a four-drive RAID 0, you might feel better that the X25-E’s are designed for server use and should have 10 times the life of a consumer drive.

Continue reading this review after the jump.

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