Desktops

The Wind Top AE2220 resembles Apple’s flat-screen iMac series and has pretty much the same functionality – with the exception of one essential detail: a touch screen.

Most people treat a PC like a sofa. You buy the best one you can afford and it’s strictly no shoes or snacks for the first six weeks. After that, things gradually slip until four years later, the dog is sleeping on it and there are suspicious stains on the underside of all the cushions…

MESH, the popular maker of PCs for home, business and gamers has recently announced immediate availability of a new ‘customer-friendly PC’ that’s affordable, stacked with features and designed to sit in your lounge and used with your existing HDTV.

Arbico certainly knows how to put together a sub-£1000 gaming PC. It boasts many of the same manufacturers and options you’d see in much more expensive base-units, yet it has worked hard to push the price down. One of the ways it’s done this is by working with AMD’s Phenom II platform. It’s still the cheaper option up against Intel’s i7 platform, but there are compromises to consider…

We don’t often receive ‘complete’ systems for review these days, so it was something of a rare treat to get a fully fledged rig – complete with LCD screen, keyboard and mouse – from Mesh recently. Its Elite Ice 7 is rarer still when you look at the price tag…

It’s rare to see a DirectX10-compatible base unit on the market for under £600, and we generally get quite excited when one pops up for review. Getting decent gaming performance to the masses is surely the key to the continued success of PC gaming, so when a company delivers excellent value while doing its utmost to preserve performance we’re more than happy to dish out the kudos. And OcUK’s effort with the Titan Nero deserves some serious kudos.

We review the Medion Erazer X7311 D. We hadn’t really crossed paths with the company before either, for the simple reason that this is its first gaming-specific PC…

This system from YOYOtech aims to bring outstanding performance to users looking for gaming grunt on a budget. The Phenom II is certainly no Core i7 killer, but it can mix it with the previous generation of Intel’s quad-core chips quite effectively. All-important clock speeds have been greatly increased over the previous generation of Phenoms, and YOYOtech improves on this by overclocking the X4 940’s 3.0GHz stock speed to an impressive 3.6GHz. In order to keep this 20 per cent overclock in check, the Water Dragon makes use of CoolIT’s newly released Domino A.L.C cooling system.

LAN parties aren’t just about getting together with some mates to play games – there’s much more at stake than being caught camping outside a spawn point. Attending a LAN is more akin to attending a car club meet – it’s not about the driving, its about the machines that do the driving. Making sure your PC is lovingly tricked-out with a hot chassis as well as a cutting-edge graphics card is of utmost importance, and its something CryoPC clearly recognises with the Nano. The Lian-Li V351 case is the SFF case du jour, not just because its manufacturer is widely regarded as one of best case-makers in the world, but because it’s as utilitarian as it is utterly stunning to look at.

CyberPower bravely attempts to create a perfect-six system for under £550. Lucky for them the Windows Experience Index only goes to 5.9…

The 2.8GHz Phenom II X3 inside AdvanceTec’s AT-FX Vento system makes for some interesting benchmark results – but then, it’s a rather interesting processor…