Gaming requires a whole host of skill sets if you want to last even a few minutes against your opponent. You’ve got your hand-eye coordination, strategic mindset, and when you’ve exhausted all possible avenues to victory the good old kamikaze mission is in order. With so much to practice your skills on who has time to build their own PC?

PureOC has a look at the iBUYPOWER Paladin XLC V2 gaming system that pairs together some modest gaming hardware which results in a rather speedy system to plow through games with:

A closer look reveals the motherboard is a LGA1156 Gigabyte P55-UD5, a very nice choice, with solid BIOS features and enough slots and overclocking/tweaking options to keep an enthusiast pleased. The Gigabyte board houses a Core i7 870, the flagship Socket 1156 CPU offered by Intel. This chip is not cheap, and it is fast. In fact, iBUYPOWER has overclocked the i7 870 here to an impressive 3.8GHz from a stock 2.93GHz. The CPU is cooled by an Asetek LCLC 240mm radiator (slim profile) liquid cooling setup, an excellent choice, offering a much quieter setup than a high performance air cooler. Seeing a liquid cooling setup in a custom-painted case, particularly when you bring it to a LAN party, is pretty special. You’ll be sure to get all the attention with this combination.

Perhaps a single, more powerful, graphics card in the build would’ve sufficed but it’s a slick gaming computer for a low price.

While we’d all like to own the top of the line when it comes to hardware and the like sometimes you’ll settle for the lower cost option because you really don’t need all of that power or the budget is set lower than you’d want. That doesn’t mean you can’t get your game on.

Test Freaks has a look at the iBuyPower Corei5 gaming computer which puts together a competent set of hardware for your gaming needs all at an acceptable price:

Before we get into the comparison, I wanted to touch on the Express Gate Asus Splashtop. It’s a nice feature so you can get some stuff done, without actually having to boot into windows, the entire OS is right on the board itself. I’m not going to go into it all as it’s been covered many other places in depth but it’s a very useful, and quick to do quite a few things.

Heck their test system even includes a built-in OS should you want to do some basic web browsing without the tedious operating system load up.

Gaming systems are a funny thing. The speed of your components dictates where it sits on a rating scale, so while that top of the line CPU overclocked to an insane degree sure does handle tasks quickly that mid-range graphics card you paired it with is a bottleneck on its performance.

AnandTech has a look at the IBUYPOWER Gamer Paladin F860-a gaming system sporting a swift Intel Core i7 940 CPU and a mid-range Radeon HD 4870 1GB graphics card. Here’s their take:

The software side of the system is generally
clean, without a lot of bloatware. There are 43 processes running,
which is about average, and all of the support information is listed
prominently. Windows Update is turned on and set to automatic, which we
dislike seeing on a gaming machine. The video card drivers were
up-to-date at the time of shipping (8.11), and the system was tested at
that revision throughout except for Far Cry 2, which was tested with
the latest 9.4 drivers.

As far as pre-built systems are concerned it’s as good as any but you’ll want to opt for some more powerful graphics cards if you demand the fastest in performance.