Digital Storm Ode Level 3

Pros: Powerful enough for most games.

Cons: Price, sort of.

Summary: The complaint about the USB 3.0 plug going into the rear I/O of the motherboard is Digital Storm's fault in the choice of the case, not in their wiring decisions. The Corsair 600T has always been made with an external USB 3.0 plug that goes into the back of the motherboard, instead of an internal USB 3.0 header. Digital Storm's wiring seems perfectly fine. Also the case is wide because the it was made for builders to have excellent cable routing behind the motherboard tray, and also for the support of a fairly large 240mm radiator on the top used for liquid cooling if needed.

In performance, having an i7-2600K and two GTX 570's in SLI is fast enough for just about every game out there if you're only using a single monitor. However, higher resolutions, such as going way over 1920x1080 and/or using multiple monitors, requires more graphics memory. Most GTX 570's only have 1280MB of memory which is really only enough for up to reoslutions of 1920x1080 or maybe 1920x1200 when gaming (note: video card memory does NOT add up in a multiple video card setup, both for CrossfireX and SLI). The lower memory in a high end card like the GTX 570 really hurts itself when trying to push the graphics processor to its full potential in extremely high resolutions and also with multiple monitors.

This brings me to my point of price. Relative to other boutique vendors, the performance is very good. However, it doesn't make much sense to throw so much money at a vendor to build a gaming pc for you. With a $2000 budget, the performance of this PC can be surpassed significantly if the person is willing to do some research on parts to build his or her own computer. An AMD Radeon 7970--the fastest single graphics processing unit as of Q1 2012, and even boasts many other features such as PCI Express 3.0 support with the upcoming Ivy Bridge intel processors--CrossfireX dual gpu setup can be achieved with this budget. Also, having a pre-overclocked 2600k does not mean very much. The i7-2600k has an unlocked multiplier (indicated by the "k") so it is absurdly easy to overclock on your own, and getting over 4.5ghz is typical. Another thing to note is that there is very little difference between the $100 cheaper i5-2500k and the i7-2600k in gaming performance since most games currently do not take advantage of hyperthreading from an i7 cpu.

If you have a lot of money to spend on a gaming computer and you do not feel like researching much on computers, then this is one of the best values out there. If you are willing to spend some time researching computer components, then a computer of the same performance can be easily built by yourself for less than $2000.