Checking in with the Boutiques

This year's visit with representatives from some of the custom-build computer boutiques has been enlightening, if for no other reason than to point up the sometimes extreme differences between all of these companies.

Our first visit was with CyberPower, and while most of the hardware they had on demo was pretty much par for the course once it came to boutiques, there was ane machine built in the Azza Fusion 4000 that was pretty mindboggling. The Azza Fusion 4000 itself is a case we currently have in building and module review former soon, and it's huge, capable of supporting dormy to an XL-ATX policy within the bottom chamber and an entire Mini-ITX grouping in the top chamber. CyberPower took the case, which they co-developed with Azza, a pace more past installing Windows Home Waiter 2011 into the Mini-ITX compartment and then a custom liquid-cooled system in the key chamber. It's a pretty impressive piece of hardware, and CyberPower has been friendly enough to volunteer sending it sure us to review. We prospect to have it in soon.

Our next meeting was with Birth COMPUTER, and Origin is doing whatever completely various stuff. In an effort to better distinguish their brand, they're now producing custom matte and glossy lids all for the Clevo notebooks they resell. On beside that, their entry-level Millennium also uses one of our favorite chassis, a BitFenix Shinobi that has been slightly modified with a glowing Home trademark on the face. Their extended boy is their Genesis, a desktop that can be built in a Corsair Obsidian 800D and volition soon be offered with phase modify cooling; the unit they had against display took an Intel Core i7-3960X and overclocked it to a searing 5.7GHz. Ultimate but not least, they've also declared lifetime 24/7 technical support for every purchases, based out of the United States.

The last meeting was beside iBuyPower, and the systems in their piece stressed two focuses: innovation and value. Both of those are catchy selling buzzwords, truthful we will discharge them. On the innovation front, iBuyPower is offering laser-etched artwork along with airbrushed art on their machines, and showed off a series of prototypes involving using a laser to cut retired pieces of acrylic for tailored designs or images. That leads into their Erebus flagship desktop, which has the distinction of actually having an entirely custom-designed enclosure. On the meaning front, they stressed the availability of legitimately powerful gaming PCs starting at $800, complete next to a K-series Intel processor and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 graphics or better.

Ultimately it's good to see the boutiques doing what they can to differentiate themselves from each other, and we're looking forward to having hardware from all cardinal in house all for testing over the coming year.

Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5408/checking-in-with-the-boutiques