Quiet and Beautiful

AVADirect wasn’t really a systems builder on our radar until late last year when we reviewed their Avant Mini Cube Gaming PC. After extensive testing, we found that the system was well configured, well built, and well priced, quickly propelling AVADirect to the top as one of our favorite custom PC builders.

Recently, AVADirect sent us another one of the systems in their lineup, the AVADirect X370 Quiet Gaming PC, which as its name implies is AVADirect’s quiet gaming PC offering based on AMD’s X370 Ryzen platform.

AVADirect Quiet Gaming PC Specs Desktop AVADirect X370 Quiet Gaming PC Case Phanteks Eclipse [...]

Welcome to Custom PC Review’s Best Gaming PC Builds! If you’re looking to build a new computer to play all the latest games, but you’re unsure of what parts to buy to create the optimal build at a certain price-point, we’re here to help.

Below you’ll find four builds sorted by budget of what we think will help create the best and most powerful gaming PCs for the price. Each piece of hardware in each build is hand-picked by our staff through consideration of a multitude of criteria such as price, performance, reliability, and cost. Furthermore, hardware recommend for our builds all have either been reviewed by us or is well known and [...]

At CES 2017 we had the chance to stop by EVGA, which had a huge lineup of new products including the all-new iCX cooled GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 graphics cards, Intel Z270 motherboards, a brand new lineup of budget-minded B3 power supplies, and the finished version of the quick disconnect CLC coolers we saw back at Computex last year.

 

EVGA Shows off all-new iCX Cooled GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 FTW2 and SC2

Starting off our tour we had the chance to take a look EVGA’s brand new “iCX” cooled graphics cards which are set to replace the ACX 3.0 cooled cards which make up the majority of their current GeForce 10-series lineup. The new [...]

Without a doubt, the past few days have been pretty rough for EVGA. After numerous complaints of prematurely failing cards have popped up online which finally culminated in a video showing one of EVGA’s GeForce GTX 1080 FTWs literally exploding, the company has recently issued an official statement on their graphics cards and are offering a fix to all potentially affected graphics cards.

According to EVGA’s internal testing, affected graphics cards include the EVGA GeForce GTX 1080, 1070, and 1060 using the EVGA ACX 3.0 cooler. They found that the premature failures have been due to running stress testing apps such as Furmark which in some cases [...]

$1,500 Gaming Workstation Build

One of the most popular builds on our site is the gaming workstation, a hybrid build that’s both great at games yet also is able to pull double duty for workstation activities such as video editing, photoshopping, and even 3D modeling. This makes sense as computers are so versatile that it only makes sense to have a single PC that’s capable of not only playing games, but for doing work as well.

Our budget this month is $1,500 which means we’ll have a relatively high end build although it’s not quite as high end as your maxed out $2,500 build. That said, this build should easily play all your games at the [...]

The folks over at Videocardz have given us yet another look at a pair of soon to be released custom designed GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards, this time from none other than EVGA. The cards shown are the EVGA GTX 1080 ACX3 FTW EVGA GTX 1080 ACX3 SC models. Both of which feature an all-new cooler and shroud design, which seems to be comprised of both metal and plastic materials.

EVGA GTX 1080 ACX3 FTW

The FTW model, as usual is the higher-end of the two, and features dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, for what we can only imagine will make for some excellent overclocking headroom. It also appears to be slightly wider than the standard SC model, which likely [...]

EVGA has just announced its first “VR Ready” graphics card which comes out of the box with extra options specifically made for VR headsets. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti VR Edition includes a 5.25-inch/3.5-inch front-panel that gives you a front-facing HDMI 2.0 port, as well as a pair of USB 3.0/3.1 ports, which is connected via a standard USB 3.0 header on your motherboard. This allows for easier connection of VR headsets, as it eliminates the need to connect the headset to the back of your PC.

Aside from the front-mounted HDMI port located on the card itself, there doesn’t seem to be anything significantly different about this GPU versus EVGA’s [...]

$1,500 Mid-Range Gaming System

With a number of AAA games being released for the holiday season as well as a number of new hardware announcements for the holiday season, we thought we’d do a new gaming PC build article, this time designed for the mid-range crowd.

With a budget of $1,500, our goal this time was to create a gaming build which would allow gamers to play the latest games at 1080p, 1440p or 1600p at the highest possible settings (or pretty close to it). Additionally, we also designed this system to be as “futureproof” as possible, utilizing all the latest technologies including Intel’s latest Skylake architecture, DDR4 memory, USB 3.1 [...]

Premium Build Quality for Under $200

Back in August, NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 950, which is the first of their 900 series cards to be priced in the budget market. Before its release, users shopping for an NVIDIA graphics card would either have to shell out at least $200 for the GTX 960, or make due with the aging GTX 750 and 750 Ti. Today, we’ll be taking a look at one of the more premium GTX 950 models available on the market, the EVGA GTX 950 FTW.

With the GTX 950, NVIDIA finally rounds out their GTX 900 series lineup, leaving only a gap in pricing between the GTX 970 and the GTX 960. This would likely be filled with either a possible GTX 960 Ti, or a [...]