Good Value but Perhaps Overkill

Good Value but Perhaps Overkill

This review winds up being difficult to wrap-up. There are two faces to the iBUYPOWER Paladin XLC: what is, and what could have been.

We'll start with the what is: it's a powerful, if hot and noisy (at least during gaming), custom machine. It's flexible enough, and the motherboard the build is based on is one of the best on the market, leveraging a wealth of features (including USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps) that ensure it will remain useful for some time. The SSD used for the operating system drive is snappy enough but does run into problems when you try to multitask while doing heavy file-copying procedures, a fact I can personally attest to on my own machine. Will it play anything you throw at it and handle any task you ask of it? Absolutely.

But there's also the what could have been: the overclock is a lazy and poorly-tuned one, leaving both performance and efficiency on the table. A pair of GeForce GTX 470's in SLI is also a curiously unbalanced choice: if heat and noise aren't issues, and you're already spending this much, go whole hog on a pair of 480's. Otherwise, save yourself a healthy amount of bread and hearing and go for the 460's. And if you're only gaming on one monitor, short of a 30" LCD a single Radeon 5850/5870 or GeForce GTX 470/480 is probably just fine. iBUYPOWER offers a lot of options, but we don't feel the pair of 470s is the right call.

What this boils down to is this: is the iBUYPOWER Paladin XLC as reviewed here worth the cost? Thankfully, yes, we think it is. What you're looking at is a premium of a couple hundred dollars to have your machine overclocked from the factory, and to not have to actually assemble it yourself. The three year warranty is excellent as well. This isn't the configuration we would recommend for this build (we'd spring for a Corsair SSD for not much more and a pair of GTX 460's instead), but the price is actually reasonable given what iBUYPOWER offers in addition to the cost of components. With a couple of changes, this would be an excellent alternative for someone tired of the troubleshooting sometimes involved in building their own machine, or for someone who just wants a solid gaming desktop.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7orrAp5utnZOde6S7zGiqoaenZIB5hJNooJutqaW8uLHRZqeapJGZtq9516WaaGw%3D