Reviews Of Desktop PCs, DIY PC Builds, All-In-Ones, And Small Form Factor PCs
In-depth product reviews and news of Computer Desktops, DIY PC Builds, All-In-One PCs, and Small Form Factor PCs. If it crunches numbers, pushes pixels, throws down the frag or provides a digital canvass for content creation, you'll find it there.
Unlike the enthusiast system manufacturers, Alienware and VoodooPC, Richmond, Virginia-based Velocity Micro is still an independent, privately held company. In fact, Velocity Micro is doing well enough on its own to have even purchased the enthusiast, boutique system maker, Overdrive PC last year. On top of that, Velocity Micro is one of the...
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Asus certainly made a splash this year with their line of ultra-light, ultra-affordable Eee PC notebooks and they've been fleshing out the product line ever since with a wealth of new offerings, as the company continues to milk the product's successful brand name recognition for all it's worth. Since their initial release we've...
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Synopsis: In some respects, when we think about what the capabilities of a $349 desktop system should be like, we can't help but be impressed what Asus has achieved and the overall value of the Eee Box. What's more impressive though is the Eee Box's absolutely tiny form-factor and completely miserly power consumption. ...
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When you visit NVIDIA’s Web site and hit the Products drop-down menu, a long list of the company’s offerings scrolls down in front of you—impressive for an organization that originally found notoriety by designing the fastest desktop display adapters.Graphics processors for the desktop, workstation, and server space still dominate NVIDIA’s...
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Dell's XPS branded products have come a long way since they first appeared in 1993. Starting life as a performance trim for the Dimension product line, Dell has nurtured XPS into a well-known and respected premium performance brand. While not all XPS branded products are specifically targeted at gamers, gaming has always been at the core...
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Enthusiasts are familiar with the Smooth Creations team as the artists behind the airbrushed gaming rigs from the likes of Falcon Northwest, Alienware, and Maingear. Not as many may be aware, however, that Smooth Creations has recently expanded from the realm of painting cases to that of building and selling painted, customizable systems and...
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In the last half year, Dell has been busy revamping their entire desktop XPS lineup. First came the XPS 420 late last year, a premium multimedia workstation. Then Dell introduced a new mid-range gaming oriented desktop, the XPS 630 early this year. The 630 is a mid-tower sized gaming desktop styled after the flagship XPS 700 series but with...
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The intoxicating smell of fresh paint was the first sensation to greet us when we opened up a very special package from Diamond Multimedia and Smooth Creations. This was quickly followed by jaw-dropping awe as we admired the meticulous detail of the system's custom paint job. Speculating at the power waiting to be unleashed under its hood,...
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Do you remember the original Pentium 4? It launched at 1.5 GHz and gave us our first bittersweet taste of the NetBurst microarchitecture, which Intel would use to replace the P6 design.When the Pentium 4 began its life, Intel manufactured the chips on a 180 nm node. The 42 million transistors that went into those first Pentium 4s - internally...
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If you've followed the tech sector for any appreciable amount of time, you've no doubt heard the tale of Dell Inc. - one of those stories where a guy with a dream founded a company and eventually built it into a corporate giant. Right from the beginning, Michael Dell believed that the future of PC sales...
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As gamers and hardware enthusiasts, it’s easy to get jaded by Extreme Edition processors and multi-card CrossFire configurations. They push performance full-bore. And although you’ll never hear AMD, Intel, or NVIDIA recommending against using their enthusiast offerings in higher-end configurations, there’s no denying that Xeons, Opterons,...
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For many of you, Maingear Computer may not be a household name and that would probably be just fine with the folks out at the shop in Union New Jersey. Loosely classified as a specialty high performance system builder and retailer, Maingear's mission statement on style, performance and quality claims that they strive to not...
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It was back in January of this year at the Consumer Electronics Show that AMD first revealed their plans for the DTX open industry standard for small form factor computers. The focus of those early briefings was to explain AMD’s vision for interoperable small form factor systems. As it stands today, most SFF systems from large...
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A short while after Dell purchased Alienware late last year, news broke that Hewlett Packard had acquired boutique system vendor Voodoo PC. Voodoo PC is best known for their high performance gaming PC's that feature custom cases, some with lavish paint jobs, unique cooling solutions, and impeccable wiring jobs. We evaluated a Voodoo Omen...
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When it comes time for a new rig, there are those who want the power of a full-sized system but without the footprint of a mid or full sized case. Today, we're going to take a look at a barebones kit that promises full-sized performance in a footprint no bigger than a shoebox. Enter the Shuttle SDXi Barebones Kit. The SDXi Barebone...
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It was at this year's Consumer Electronics Show that we were first exposed to an Intel demo machine dubbed the ' V8' . Intel wouldn't label the machine as a direct response to the QuadFX platform by AMD, but they did want to stress the point that enthusiasts could have a dual-socket, eight-core...
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It's probably safe to assert that, by and large, DIY Small Form Factor PCs are still niche products. Although they have been offered by the likes of Shuttle, AOpen, MSI and many others for nearly half a decade now, there's still an audible gasp that's heard from non PC-centric folks when then first encounter one. Questions range from, "What...
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If you are a regular here at HotHardware.com, you have most likely heard of Alienware, one of the companies that helped establish the market for high-performance, gaming PCs. Since hitting the scene in 1996, Alienware has become a leader not only in gaming PCs but also in high-performance desktop, notebook, media center, and professional...
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Without question, the process of choosing a standard, pre-built PC or building one yourself has become almost trivial over the last few years. Given the caliber of hardware on the market, even with just a little bit of knowledge, it is difficult to purchase a system today which would not be suitable for nearly any standard application....
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Last summer, Dell agreed to purchase Alienware in a controversial merger of two very different companies. Alienware, who was looking to raise capital to fund its world-wide expansion, found a good partner in Dell when it came to realize that it would be able to meet its demands while simultaneously benefiting from...
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NVIDIA's two major launches last week marked a significant advancement in both 3D Graphics and PC Motherboard feature-set and performance. The launch of NVIDIA's G80 GPU with their GeForce 8800 series of graphics cards was the advent of the first truly DX10 capable GPU architecture on the...
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When Shuttle first thrust small form factor systems upon the Do-It-Yourself crowd in 2001, they were deemed niche products that wouldn't likely appeal to the masses, due to inherent expandability deficiencies and limited feature-sets relative to full-sized desktop systems. Over the last half decade though, interest in small form...
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