Gadgetory

hi I'm rich brown senior editor for CNET today we're gonna take a look at the main gear Potenza Superstock so this is main gears high-end small form-factor gaming desktop you can see it's got some nice clean looks and there's really some fast performance inside this box and you have to compromise due to its size a little bit it's not quite the most upgradable PC we've seen and because of that you can't add a second graphics card and you can get other pcs in this price range the two cards they'll give you a bit more performance as long as you understand the sacrifices oh this is a pretty great high-end gaming system so like a lot of minier designs we've seen recently the ports on the system are actually at the top of the case you take off this plastic vent and inside you can see there's the power buttons helping USB ports here down on the motherboard you'll see inputs for USB 3 as well as various kinds of audio now on the front of the case you can see there's one slot here for the DVD drive there's no blu-ray drive of the system but you can get that as an option you'll see part of the magic with this system those tuners to take these panels off front panel pops down and so do the back and this side and this side of the case is fixed to the chassis but the rest of it gives you pretty clean access to the inside of the system so you'll note that this is a really compact design inside of here and in fact I didn't even try to get the graphics card off because I really wasn't sure if I could get it back in it's sort of hemmed in on the top and the bottom here from this side of the case you can see here's the slim optical drive if we look over here we can see here's the hard drive sled the liquid cooling pipes and down here is the heat exchanger there's memory in there as well as a liquid cooled CPU so for its components the system has an overclocked core i7 3770k CPU eight gigs of memory an nvidia geforce gtx 680 graphics card as well as the solid state and standard mechanical hard drive setup now in our lab we found this is one of the fastest pcs for application testing and for games it's among the fastest in terms of single card pcs the only real caveat as far as this performance we mentioned earlier you can buy a similar PC in the same price range that has two higher-end graphics cards they'll give you better performance especially if you go to two displays so I can really only recommend this system if you need a particularly compact gaming desktop or if you like it looks overall its price is fair for what you get if you include size on that premium but you just have to understand that you sacrifice some upgrading as well as some potential and graphics capability so much Brown this is main gears pretends a super stock