Sometimes, you just want to bust out of having to think about value and cram as much horsepower into a computer box as you can. However, performance is a word that has a different meaning depending on who you talk to and who you buy from. As you’d expect, it’s something the local PC makers offer in spades – on any type of application – while brand-name PCs continue to struggle with PC gaming. That's a certainly not a problem with the three local desktop PCs reviewed here, though.
One tip before buying a PC: If you’re a gamer, check the chassis width of any system you look at before you buy. Buy a low-profile system and finding or upgrading the graphics card in the future could well be substantially more difficult. Thankfully, all three systems here featured full-width chassis.
By Darren Yates – January 29, 2012
TI Computers' Twin Power 2000 is an impressive bit of kit for the price, delivering a Core i7-2600K processor cranked to 4.5GHz, a huge 16GB of RAM and twin Radeon HD 6870 graphics cards in CrossFire mode for excellent gaming speed. What’s clever is the HD 6870 is arguably the best bang-for-buck card going around and two of them combined gives the GeForce GTX 590 in the Excel Computers PE-590 a decent run for its money.
By Darren Yates – January 29, 2012
Pacstar followed much the same route as TI Computers with its 580 Value system, overclocking the Core i7-2600K to 4.5GHz and the 128GB SSD, 2TB hard drive and Blu-ray burner trifecta. The main difference was the lack of wireless networking and digital TV tuner, but also the change in graphics card, with a GeForce GTX 580 on show here.
By Darren Yates – January 29, 2012
Excel’s PE-590 ought to have been a cracker of a system, combining the very highly rated Core i5-2500K cranked to 4.5GHz with a high-end GeForce GTX 590 graphics card. And in terms of performance, it doesn’t disappoint. Topping 103fps on AvP at 1,920 x 1,080 pixels, there’s enough grunt here to handle any game at any quality setting.
Three sub-$2000 desktop flyers
