Best gaming PCs we've seen of late

Matthew Elliott, Section Editor April 6, 2009

Let me start with a disclaimer: I'm a console gamer. Always have been, since my friend down the street in Minneapolis got an Atari 2600 in 1979, and I trumped him a year later with Mattel's Intellivision. (Along with George Plimpton, we found Intellivision's Major League Baseball to be clearly superior to Atari's Home Run baseball. (Intellivision baseball, hockey, skiing were pretty much all I cared about in 1980.) Intellivision baseball, hockey, and skiing were pretty much all I cared about in 1980.) Like Larry King with wives, there's long list of consoles that I traded in for newer models over the years: Intellivision to Intellivision 2, to NES, to Sega Genesis, to PlayStation, to Xbox, to Xbox 360. As I moved from console to console, I never did find the need to plunk down for a gaming PC, and thankfully any old PC can run an Intellivision emulator.

If I were a PC gamer (and I happened across a pile of money), however, here are the systems I'd be considering. Since May, we've reviewed one gaming PC each month that has really impressed us. These five systems are all overclocked, and all but the AVADirect system feature a quad-core processor, so you know your investment--prices of our review units range from $3,600 to nearly $6,600--is well equipped to stand the test of time. Three of the five earned an Editors' Choice, and the most recent of the bunch, the HP Blackbird 002, is the highest-rated desktop we've ever seen at CNET--at least since Rich Brown and I have been here.

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