Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the Asus essentia CM 6870 so this boring looking desktop is a thousand dollar PC and it comes with Intel's brand new Ivy Bridge CPU now what that means is that this system has a new processor as well as a new motherboard there's some interesting features here but nothing that's really earth-shattering or that's gonna change the game as for the desktop PC market so the specific chip in the system is the Intel Core i7 3770 it's a quad core chip it runs at 3.4 gigahertz and it's a little bit more power efficient than the previous generation 2000 series core i7 CPUs so you won't see a big leap in performance over say older systems that have the Core i7 2670 threaded and multitasking performance gains along with the new CPU is a new motherboard this system has an H 77 chipset and it has USB 3 built into it now if you bought a new computer in the past year or so you've certainly seen USB 3 before but with USB 3 baked into the circuitry now you should be able to get USB 3 for less and you'll probably see it in systems that cost much less than this one you'll see the usual assortment of ports on the front it's got a nice blu-ray DVD combo drive on the front as well otherwise this design really isn't much to write home about on the back here there's a lot of nice connectivity options you get USB 3 7po and audio USB 2 so let's some kind of useless video ports and they're useless because that comes with a graphics card that's a budget 3d card it'll play most games at reasonable resolution but you're probably gonna have to dial down the image quality now despite the new CPU and motherboard of course the system looks pretty much the same as any old off-the-shelf desktop you'll see the CPU here it's a standard fan over here you've got the graphics card there's 8 gigs of memory with a couple slots to expand a 2 terabyte hard drive which is a little bit more than we usually see at this price and down here below the graphics card to get a little bit of expansion room you've got 2 1 X PCI Express slots and a single standard PCI slot overall this is a relatively unexcited commodity PC it's got a reasonable price for its components at $9.99 the new Intel chip is kind of exciting we'll probably see that across all kinds of new systems throughout the year but overall it's kind of hard to recommend a system without any real standout features over the many others that are going to use that same CPU so I'm rich Brown this is the Asus essentia CM 68 70