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 ...

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

If you doubt the existence of mirror universes that are almost the same except for minor changes, Digital Storm's 950Si rig could make a believer out of you. The 950Si is that similar to Maingear's Kick Ass Award-winning ePhex that we reviewed in ...

In graphics, the 950Si features dual EVGA GeForce GTX 295 cards while Maingear opted for three GeForce GTX 285 cards. Both rigs sport Intel's top proc-the Core i7 975 Extreme Edition at 4GHz-but get there differently. Digital Storm does a straight ...

You know when a little person shows up in a Ben Stiller movie he's gonna whoop some ass. Sometimes that's not just a comedy film cliché. Take, for example, Falcon Northwest's size-challenged Fragbox II. You'd think this Halfling PC would have a hard ...

Faster than big, bad gaming desktops and almost fits under an airplane seat

Slightly noisy and could use faster disk I/O for the price

This is the third Fragbox II we've seen in recent years and it's also clearly the fastest. With its overclocked 2.93GHz Core i7-940, 6GB of DDR3/1066, Lite On Blu-ray burner, Seagate 1.5TB Barracuda, and a pair of GeForce GTX 285 cards in SLI, this PC ...

All-in-one PCs like Dell's XPS One 24 aren't the most powerful computers on the market and they know it. Like thin-and-light notebooks, they trade brute power for a thin, stylish profile and quiet operation-and we're absolutely fine with that. We'd ...

Beautiful display ; wireless keyboard features a built-in track pad ; fast (for an all-in-one)

No Blu-ray drive ; keyeboard lacks a numeric keypad ; speakers sound harsh ; annoying fan noise

We dig that we can tilt the Dell's XPS One 24, but it would be even better if it could swivel, too

Gateway's trademark cow is long dead, but that doesn't mean the company can't be its quirky old self-something the FX6800 gaming rig illustrates perfectly. With its itsy-bitsy, microATX board, "I don't care about appearances" wiring, and moderate ...

Quieter and faster than many far more expensive PCs

MicroATX board limits your expansion capabilities

The results were surprisin. While the FX6800 didn't clean anyone's clock, the Core 2 Quad boxes didn't exactly blow the lowly $3,000 Gateway out of the water, either. For example, the radical, oil-cooled, nearly $11,000, Hardcore Reactor that we ...

The Velocity Micro Raptor Z90 is the first production rig we've tested that boasts Intel's new Core i7 microarchitecture-and it really cooks. Velocity cranked the 3.2GHz clock speed on Intel's quad-core Hyper-Threaded Core i7-965 Extreme Edition to 3 ...

Blazingly fast, aesthetically pleasing, and well made

Front-panel bezels could be more firmly secured

The Raptor Z90 blew through our benchmarks. It completed our Premiere Pro CS3 test in just 526 seconds. That's nearly 30 seconds faster than November's Digital Storm rig and nearly a minute faster than last month's AVADirect system, both of which ...

HP's TouchSmart line of all-in-one desktop computers has undergone quite a transformation since we examined the very first model, the IQ770, nearly two years ago. Not only is every change for the better, but HP has managed to slash prices by several ...

Awesome touch screen, tiny footprint, excellent value

Too slow for hardcore gaming ; TouchSmart applications are weak

HP sells three preconfigured TouchSmart models. We reviewed the middle offering-the $1,500 IQ506t-which features a 22-inch touch-screen, a 2.16GHz mobile Intel Core2 Duo CPU, a discrete videocard, and a 500GB hard drive

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 ...

Solid build ; great tech support ; high performance

Shipped with Vista ; no backup drive ; the leak hurts the final score

Aside from this initial gaffe, the AVADirect impressed us with its build quality. The first thing we saw when we opened the SilverStone Temjin TJ07 case was a sprawl of water-cooling tubes running to both GPUs, the RAM, and the CPU. The aforementioned ...

We expected LG's new 6x external Blu-ray burner to perform similarly to the company's GBW-H20L, what with the two having identical read/write speed ratings, but we were wrong. The external drive is a bigger, more expensive letdown. Hit the jump for ...

Good BD-R and DVD-R write times

Huge ; pathetic BD-RE writes ; not worth the price

The BE06 redeemed itself with DVD-R writes. The drive is rated at 16x and was able to write 4.38GB to a single-layer disc in 5:42-a second faster than the LG GBW-H20L. The drives were as closely matched on DVD-R reads

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 ...

A Falcon Northwest PC that doesn't break the bank

Windows Vista still suxors, and the rig isn't suited for high-res gaming

That doesn't make it any less of a machine, though. Inside the solidly constructed aluminum box is Intel's new Core 2 Duo E8400 dual-core CPU. Code-named Wolfdale, this 45nm chip runs at a stock clock of 3GHz, which Falcon gooses a notch to 3.24GHz. ...