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?

In our original review of the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Prime I did the best I could do given limited testing opportunity with the platform before the NDA lifted on all the reviews. I made the commitment back then to come back with additional findings after I had spent more time with the platform. Today I'm back to make good on that promise.

Two more Eee Pad Transformer Prime samples later and here we are. Next week retailers and etailers should begin shipping the first orders of the Prime out to customers. There were a number of gaps I wasn't happy with in our original review of the Prime, I've spent the past couple of weeks trying to fill them. Even what I'm presenting today isn't perfect, but when combined with the original review it should paint a more complete picture of the Eee Pad Transformer Prime.

And I've got video, something I had to cut out of the original review due to time constraints:

Read on for the follow-up!

After covering the budget and midrange sectors of the DIY PC market, as well as pre-built desktops and laptops, today we have a guide outlining mainstream high-end builds. Saying the computers outlined in this guide are capable is an understatement—these are seriously powerful (and spendy!) systems. These rigs check out around $2000, at the top of the mainstream market. Each of them will be able to serve their owners well for years to come.

We start with a fancy mini-ITX HTPC that has lots of room for a huge media library and is capable of encoding videos quickly, followed by an impressive gaming box, and finish with a powerful workstation featuring Intel's latest CPU architecture, Sandy Bridge-E.

AMD briefed us last week on several new and upcoming technologies and announcements. We’ve covered the AMD Memory announcement, and next up on the list is AMD’s Radeon Mobility HD 7000M. While we were getting this article ready, we also had NVIDIA launch their updated GeForce 600M parts without so much as a brief heads-up email. There’s reasons for that, which we’ll cover in this article, but we’ll start with a look at AMD’s new mobile parts before getting into the NVIDIA update.

So, what will 7000M bring to the table? Right now, not a whole lot that we haven’t already seen before. Traditionally AMD and NVIDIA have launched their new series of graphics products at the high-end and worked their way down. The high-end GPUs are the flag bearers of a generation, with new architectures being built on these large chips first before lesser products are derived from them. If we group the 7000M with the 7000 series in general (or the 600M with the 600 series), both companies are moving to their “next generation” parts on mobile first. Are we looking at a fundamental shift in the way things are done? Not really; read on to find out why.

The latest edition of our Holiday 2011 guides focuses on midrange desktops. If you enjoy the prospect of building your own PC or you just prefer the ability to customize every component, we'll have recommendations. We'll outline three different systems at $800, $1000, and $1200, with processors from AMD and Intel.

The first system we've put together is an AMD Llano APU-based PC designed to deliver acceptable gaming performance at medium resolutions as well as great "daily driver" general computing performance. Next up, we cover our latest iteration of a now "classic" i5-2500K build that offers better gaming and computing capabilities for a few hundred dollars more than the AMD build. Finally, we have an i7-2600K rig that focuses on raw computational power and eschews graphics for the time being (though you can easily add your own). So whether you're upgrading or building new, we have suggestions. Read on for more details.

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?

Going from making good motherboards to going head to head with Samsung for Google's affection is a pretty big step for ASUS, but it's one that the company has taken and done very well with. None of its peers have made the same transition, especially not while continuing to thrive in their existing businesses. I don't think anyone can say that ASUS' motherboards have suffered over the past several years as the company has transitioned, much like Apple, into the world of being a mobile computer manufacturer.

ASUS' first Android tablet was a knock out of the park. The original Eee Pad Transformer gave us a glimpse of the future with its keyboard dock while delivering a good Honeycomb experience for $100 less than the competition. As many sacrifices as ASUS had to make to reach its price point, the original Eee Pad remains one of the best Honeycomb tablets on the market. But the show must go on and simply being the cheapest on the block doesn't work anymore, particularly with companies like Amazon redefining what cheap means. It was time for a new flagship and today we have that tablet:

Priced at $499 the Eee Pad Transformer Prime will be available in North America during the week of 12/19. Read on for our full review!

A little more than a year ago NVIDIA introduced the GF110 GPU, the power-optimized version of their Fermi patriarch, GF100. The first product was their flagship GTX 580, followed by the eventual GTX 570. Traditionally NVIDIA would follow this up with a 3^rd product. The GTX 200 series had 285/275/260, and the GTX 400 series had GTX 480/470/465. However in the past year we have never seen the 3^rd tier GF110 card… until now.

Today NVIDIA will be launching the GeForce GTX 560 Ti With 448 Cores (and yes, that’s the complete name), a limited edition product that will serve as the 3^rd tier product, at least for a time. And while NVIDIA won't win any fans with the name, the performance is another matter entirely. If you've ever wanted a GTX 570 but didn't want to pay the $300+ price tag, as we'll see NVIDIA has made a very convincing argument that this is the card for you.

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.

Way back in the dark ages of CES 2011, we were able to lay hands on and play with some interesting new technology from Toshiba. They had a prototype notebook on hand that was capable of glasses-free 3D similar to the Nintendo 3DS, but with a bigger screen and the ability to track head movement and adjust viewing angles accordingly. Yet the release of this 3D notebook has been an unusually quiet one. Is the 15-inch Qosmio F755 a sound design, or is there a reason why it's been unceremoniously dropped into the marketplace? Let's find out.