One of the benefits of going with a boutique builder is being able to get custom machines that are a little more specialized than what you might get from HP or even Alienware. While bigger vendors can produce their own cases, those designs have to suit a wide variety of customers. Boutiques can cherry pick existing hardware and modify it for specific purposes, gearing each build to suit the end user's exact needs. It's the same benefit many of us enjoy from building our own machines, but for those who can't or won't, builders like AVADirect are here to pick up the slack.

Which leads us to today's build, which AVADirect dubs their Silent Gaming PC. Their builders have tried to take a standard powerhouse boutique machine and kill the noise. Did they succeed, or is the Silent Gaming PC merely the sum of its parts?

We say it every year, but the trends continue so we’ll keep repeating it: laptops and mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular, often at the cost of desktop sales. This year we saw a lot of people looking at smartphones and tablets along with laptops, and sales of those devices have skyrocketed. Still, if you need to do some serious work—writing a large document or email, working on a spreadsheet or presentation, etc.—you still need a real computer while you travel. Whether you want something for work, school, or play, we’ve got recommendations in our annual…

So pull up a chair, wrap up in a nice blanket, and get yourself a steaming cup of hot chocolate while we cover the laptop market from top to bottom. Netbooks, Chromebooks, ultrabooks, laptops and notebooks—we’ve got it all right here. Even better, you can do some of your Christmas shopping without even leaving the comforts of your own home. What better way to enjoy the season than by staying indoors?

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 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.

A little over seven months ago, we took at look at a Clevo X7200 courtesy of AVADirect that featured a desktop hex-core processor and a pair of NVIDIA's then-fastest mobile graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 480M. Since then NVIDIA has refreshed their mobile top end, and while we hope to review the GTX 485M in SLI soon, in the meantime we have another pair of mobile parts that have been making waves: the AMD Radeon HD 6970M.

This is still the same chassis, of course, so if you didn't like the X7200 concept the first time around the updated GPUs aren't going to radically alter the equation. But assuming you're after the most powerful notebook currently on the market, let's see if we can set a few more performance records.

When we reviewed the Clevo W880CU and, by extension, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 480M, we were perplexed. Certainly NVIDIA had reclaimed the mobile graphics crown and no one could dispute that, but at what cost? The 480M was a cut-down mobile version of the already dire desktop GeForce GTX 465M. We even begged the question: "Wouldn't the prudent thing to do have been to let ATI have their cake for the time being and try and push GF104 into laptops?" Today we have a better answer. AVADirect has been kind enough to send us a Clevo P170HM notebook outfitted with NVIDIA's latest and greatest, the GF104-based GeForce GTX 485M.

Finding a mainstream notebook with a high resolution screen can be harder than pulling teeth. Outside of the new Dell XPS 15 and the odd business-class machine, a resolution higher than the dismal 1366x768 on a 15.6" screen can be extremely difficult to locate and may even force you to compromise and buy a bigger machine than you'd intended. Fortunately there are options and we've tracked one down in the form of the Clevo B5130M. Sporting NVIDIA's new GeForce GT 425M and a 1080p high-resolution screen, is this notebook enough to steal the crown from the Dell XPS 15?

The march of progress is inevitable, with faster computers constantly replacing last year's top performing parts. Clevo is a company with a heavy focus on Desktop Replacement (DTR) notebooks, often at the forefront of the latest performance enhancing parts. AVADirect is one of a few vendors that sells Clevo notebooks, letting customers choose the various components. In the past, Clevo has had notebooks with desktop CPUs and a reasonably fast mobile GPU, or mobile CPUs with two GPUs; the X7200 combines the two and offers up to hex-core i7-980X CPU support with GTX 480M SLI graphics to provide what is easily the fastest notebook we've ever tested--with a "UPS battery" to match.

Given the high-end nature of the CPU and GPU options, we asked AVADirect to send us a no-holds-barred system for testing, and that's exactly what we got. Take Intel's fastest i7-980X CPU and add in 480M SLI with a couple of SSDs in RAID 0, and watch the mobile benchmark records topple one by one. If you want the (currently) fastest notebook on the block and are willing to pay the piper, meet the latest heavyweight champion of the world. We’ve got one of the very first review units to hit the streets, and we’re going to see what this bad boy can do. Ladies and gentlemen, let's get ready to rummmmble!

Boutique gaming systems are usually big, fancy, ornate affairs. They're often totally extreme, marketed to the Mountain Dew set, with massive cases and bright lights. So what happens when a manufacturer goes a little off their rocker, gets a wild hair and decides to see just how much power can be crammed into a Mini-ITX case? See how AVADirect crammed an AMD Radeon HD 5870 and an Intel quad-core into a case so small and light it makes other gaming machines seem like candidates for the next season of The Biggest Loser.

Ever wonder what a $3,000 notebook looks like? NVIDIA's first DirectX 11-capable GPU makes its way into notebooks to reclaim the fastest mobile graphics crown from AMD, starting with the Clevo W880CU. In this familiar shell beats the heart of a monster, but is the severely cut-down Fermi enough to gain a healthy lead past the Mobility Radeon HD 5870, and is the W880CU worth your gaming dollar?

Who makes the fastest mobile GPUs right now? That question can be a bit tricky to answer, since getting identical laptops other than the GPU is difficult at best. Thankfully, AVADirect was good enough to send us a couple Clevo W860CU notebooks that are indeed identical, outside of the GPU. One sports AMD's top-of-the-line Mobility Radeon HD 5870 while the other is graced with NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 285M. Which one is the better option? That's what we aim to determine with this head-to-head duel.

Unlike desktops, it's not currently possible to get a notebook that wins every benchmark, but we have three of the fastest currently available notebooks and we'll show you where each excels. Leave your wallet at the door….