While we at AnandTech recognize that a good portion of our readership prefers to roll their own as far as desktops go, not everyone is that way. Sometimes there are also situations where we'd be better off just recommending a pre-built desktop to family than damning ourselves to being tech support at all hours for the next few years. With that in mind, we bring you our...

If you want to kick back for a change, send something to family or a friend, or whatever your reason for going with a pre-built system, we have a recommendation for you this holiday season.

It's been a little while since we've had a Puget Systems desktop in, and so far we haven't yet tested any of their big dog gaming machines. Everything else we've tested, we've liked, but what happens when the fine folks over at Puget Systems pull out all the stops and put together a high end gaming machine? The answer: the Deluge, an X79-based rig in a modified Antec P183, employing a custom liquid-cooling loop. It's big, powerful, and expensive. Read on to find out if Puget Systems hit one out of the park, and if Sandy Bridge-E is the enthusiast platform we've been waiting for.

So far we've tested HP's TouchSmart 610 all-in-one and Dell's Inspiron One all-in-one, and in both cases we've found things to like along with aspects that left us wanting. Today we have on hand Toshiba's DX735 in its least expensive configuration. Starting at under a grand, the DX735 at least superficially suggests a design that's more focused, more streamlined, and less schizophrenic than the competition. Did Toshiba do right where the others stumbled, or is the DX735 just another case of too many compromises?

Our last Windows all-in-one review was for HP's TouchSmart 610, an interesting if slightly pricey piece of desktop kit. HP brought a lot of innovation to the table but they couldn't quite patch over the underlying problems with the hardware and software ecosystems that keep a touch-based all-in-one from really achieving all it can. Today we have on hand the Dell Inspiron One 2320, complete with Dell's own touch-based software interface and its own bells and whistles. Is Dell able to smooth over those issues better than HP could, or did they stumble on to some new ones?

As much as it might pain some of us to hear it, Apple's iMac really did essentially legitimize the all-in-one as an alternative to the typical desktop-and-monitor combination. There have been Windows-based alternatives here and there historically, but it's only been in the past couple of years that the Windows all-in-one market has really started to gain traction. Of course, the fact that system requirements have also reached a point where a large range of CPUs are still sufficiently fast helps.

At present, the iMac's Windows counterparts also offer a functionality that Apple has yet to duplicate: touch interface. HP adds an additional wrinkle with the TouchSmart 610: a hinge that allows you to slide the unit down and use it "kiosk style". That hinge, along with the latest Intel hardware and a surprisingly high quality screen, suggests a machine intended for myriad uses...not just an all-in-one computer, but an all-markets-in-one appliance. Find out how it performs as we put the TouchSmart 610 to the test.

When it comes to buying a pre-built desktop for the average consumer or gamer, about the only thing the big box manufacturers really have going for them is price. That hasn't stopped them from doing very well, but oftentimes the end user will be better off going to a boutique like iBuyPower for their desktop and enjoying the generally superior build and component quality along with better customer service.

But for small business and enterprise, it can be a whole different ball game, where powerhouses like Dell and HP produce uniquely designed configurations meant for mass deployment...and have the resources to greatly improve support, to boot. We've seen business class machines from both vendors before, but today we have on hand iBuyPower's Professional Series desktop. Can a smaller boutique outfox the big boys?

It's easy to build a powerful desktop if you take a big, beefy enclosure like SilverStone's FT-02 or the Thermaltake Level 10 GT and just fill it with the highest performance parts on the market, overclock them, and call it a day—and certainly we've seen our share of those. Taking all of that raw performance and shrinking it into a MicroATX case can be a little more difficult, though, especially when you're dissipating a cumulative TDP of at least 730 watts. Yet when we saw that AVADirect had produced another compact but incredibly high performance gaming desktop, we had to take a look. Gulftown may be on its way to bed soon with the advent of Sandy Bridge-E, but let's see if we can't give it one last hurrah in the process.

If you've been following along for a while, it should be pretty clear that around here, we're fans of doing a little computing. Awkward turns of phrase notwithstanding, we thought we'd seen the smallest HP had to offer when we tackled the Z210 SFF desktop not too long ago. But we were wrong, and today we present you with the smallest desktop computer in HP's enterprise lineup. Wearing its power supply on the outside, meet the HP Compaq 8200 Elite Ultra-Slim.

We're taking our second excursion into enterprise-class desktop territory with the kind of machine that should be of interest both to IT management and enthusiasts alike: HP's Z210 SFF (small form factor) workstation. Desktop computers are capable of getting smaller and smaller these days, and with the Z210 SFF, HP is hoping to make serious number crunching power available in even the tightest of spaces. It's always interesting to see just how much performance can be crammed into a tiny computer, but did HP have to make any sacrifices to hit this target?

The ultimate goal of any HTPC is to handle any media content you might desire, all while consuming very little power and generating no noise. Package all of that in an attractive case that can fit in with your other home theater equipment and you’ve got a winning HTPC solution. Previous attempts have used NVIDIA’s ION platform (Atom + GeForce GPU), which met the low-power requirement but often failed at decoding certain video streams, and the Atom CPU was so slow that the UI interactions frequently felt sluggish. Other solutions have used higher performance CPUs, but such designs use more power, creating unwanted noise from the cooling fans, and there’s still the issue of media support.

Now, Zotac hopes to satisfy the needs of the low-power crowd while providing enough performance and decoding prowess to please A/V aficionados who want 24FPS content to work properly. To do this, they’ve turned to AMD’s Brazos platform, sporting Atom-like power with roughly twice the CPU performance and integrated graphics that are faster than ION and we might just have a winner. Zotac also includes a Blu-ray drive, for those who prefer disc content. Can the new ZBOX AD03BR-PLUS-U finally supplant the higher performance CPUs with discrete GPUs that so many HTPC users end up using in order to handle all of their video decoding needs? Let’s find out.

Getting the monster gaming machines from boutiques in house for testing is often at least interesting if for no other reason than to see just how fast a computer can get when all bets are off, but most of us don't have four or five large to shell out for a gaming machine. What if we still want to play but can only afford to pay a reasonable price? This is the market that boutique builder WarFactory is aiming for with their price and power efficient Sentinel. Does it deliver?

It's time for another break from the Computex 2011 coverage, this time with an extreme system review.

There seems to be an interesting cottage industry between custom desktop boutiques in trying to build the single fastest machine consumers can buy, and it's not at all dissimilar to the kind of competitive thinking that produces utterly impractical video cards like the AMD Radeon HD 6990 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 that threaten to populate those machines. Somewhere along the line, someone said "screw it" and decided to figure out just how much of a speed demon they could build while still being able to market and sell it to consumers and support it without tarnishing the brand. DigitalStorm has pretty aggressively held on to our "fastest computer we've ever tested" crown for a while, but CyberPowerPC looks to steal it away with their Gamer Xtreme FTW Edition. Read on to find out if they succeed... and how much this puppy will set you back.

Just recently we had a chance to lay hands on SilverStone's FT03 enclosure, and it was impressive enough to earn a Bronze Editors' Choice award. It wasn't the quietest case we've ever reviewed, but it had strong thermal qualities and a slick-looking design. Now DigitalStorm has taken SilverStone's eye-catching little number, custom-painted the grills, and turned it into a double-shoebox-sized monster. The Enix we're looking at today boasts the highest overclock on an Intel Core i7-2600K we've yet seen from a system vendor and pairs it with not one but two EVGA GeForce GTX 580 cards.

The Enix will naturally be fast given those components, but how does it perform in the areas of thermals and acoustics? Read on to find out.