Are you the type of person who looks to get the most out of both system and gaming performance? Wouldn't it be great if you could take a trip down to your local computer store and test drive a truly high-end system? It would, but the reality is that most retail stores are home only to the most generic systems, and are staffed by inexperienced salespeople working their way through college.

But that's why you have THG! As promised, we rustled up some high-end system builders to bring you the first part of an extreme gaming system roundup. Each PC is equipped with AMD's fastest CPU - the FX-55 - two gigs of RAM, an Asus A8N-SLI motherboard, and of course matching NVIDIA 6800 Ultras for some serious graphics firepower.

However, there is more to a system than someone making a rig for you. What is out there for the hardcore gamer? How about for the IT professional who only wishes to go home at the end of the day and just be able to play instead of monkeying with their system? It is time we take a stroll down the bleeding edge gaming system aisle and see what's out there.

Candidates And Criteria

You might ask yourself some questions here. "Why did one system builder get selected and another not? What kinds of criteria are there in getting systems in to test? Why were there only three systems?" And so on.

Well, to answer the first question, I started searching for water-cooled SLI systems first. I wanted to see who had systems that were available for sale. The problem I encountered at the time of my search was that only five builders in North America had water systems for sale. About two to three times as many were producing air-cooled SLI systems. Since that time, even more have turned up on the radar screen.

Then I started contacting companies to see if they wanted to be involved in a roundup like this. We have had reviews for individual components and for laptops, but when was the last time we took full systems out for a test drive for our readers? We haven't really done this before, but we felt it was needed.

Interestingly, when I started contacting the companies, I received a few different responses. "Sorry, we do not have a system for review" and "sorry we are not interested" were the two main replies. But the best response was, "whom will we be up against?" I think that when given a specific set of hardware specifications, it shouldn't matter whom you are up against - your product should be able to hold its own against the other kids on the block.

Anyway, let's get off that soapbox, and note that while there will be another roundup later with more systems, it's time to get to the matter at hand. Three air-cooled systems were sent to our labs for testing. With similar settings, they should be close to each other in benchmarks - if a system lags behind the others severely, it is either because that builder is using inferior or defective components, or worse, they don't know how to configure it properly. And of course, beyond performance benchmarks, there are issues like warranties, assembly time, packaging, delivery, customer service, price and a host of other decisions you need to make when purchasing a system. We will discuss each of these factors, and more.