Danny Allen, David Murphy, PC World

If you’re in the market for a new all-in-one PC, the Dell XPS One 27 is an appealing option. It’s fast, it handles Blu-ray discs, it delivers a great picture on its 27-inch PLS screen, and it costs all of $3500 less than the current category leader, HP’s Z1 Workstation. That’s no typo: Costing $1999 (as configured, price as of May 30, 2012), the XPS One 27 racks up an impressive series of wins and makes few blunders.

It should come as little surprise that much of the XPS One 27’s speed can be traced directly to its use of an Intel Ivy Bridge processor--namely, the 3.1GHz Core i7-3770S, the lower-power, 65W chip in the high-end Ivy Bridge lineup. The i7-3770S helped the XPS One 27 nail an overall score of 143 on our WorldBench 7 suite of tests. To put that score in perspective, note that the far pricier HP Z1 Workstation posted a mark of 159 equipped with a 3.5GHz Intel Xeon E31280 processor, double the memory (16GB), a 600GB solid-state drive (versus the 2TB hard drive in Dell’s AIO), and an Nvidia Quadro 4000M graphics card, which offers 336 GPU cores versus 384 cores for the integrated Kepler chip on the XPS One, the Nvidia GT 640M.

According to the universal law articulated by Edward Murphy(we're not closely related), anything that can go wrong will go wrong. And when the wrong thing happens to your desktop PC, it can plunge you into a nightmare of unknown but seemingly malevolent forces. It's pretty easy to tell that something has gone wrong with your system. What once was fast is now slow; what once worked is now blue-screening; what once smelled okay or sounded fine now imparts the odor of overheated plastic or the screech of grinding metal gears.

Often, you have no idea how to cure what ails your system--or how severe the damage might be to your data or your hardware.

Your old desktop PC gave you years of reliable service, but eventually it couldn't keep up with modern tasks and applications; so you went out and bought something newer and faster. Now you need to decide what to do with the old clunker.

You could e-recycle it--hand it off to a responsible company that will dismantle it and recycle the parts--but what do you gain from that aside from feeling good about being environmentally responsible? Allow us to suggest another solution: Repurpose the old hulk as a local server. You can use it as a repository for automatic PC backups, or set it up as a file server that you and your employees can access while you're on the road. Those are just two of the roles that an older PC can perform that are of far more benefit to your business than having the machine collect dust or head for the dump.

Origin already has one system on our performance desktop chart; consider its Genesis LGA 2011 X79-based rig to be an encore, as when your favorite band finally busts out your favorite song (and then some) after it’s bowed and exited.

This $4599 desktop (as configured) returns to the computing concert with a hex-core processor in tow. Origin has juiced up Intel’s Core i7-3930K from its stock-clock speed of 3.2GHz to a whopping 4.9GHz. Time to send in the water-cooler—Origin’s own “Frostbyte 360” cooling system, featuring a triple-bay radiator and three 120- millimeter fans—lest one’s desktop burst into flames.

Here comes Ivy Bridge. The Asus Essentio CM6870 is one of the first budget desktops hitting the PCWorld Labs to run one of Intel’s brand-new Ivy Bridge processors and receive testing under the brand-new WorldBench 7 benchmarking suite.

The good news? This $999 system is plenty speedy, but that doesn’t mean it’s perfect. Gaming and upgrading are a hassle; however, these dull bits are balanced by the system’s Blu-ray support and impressive storage--two areas that tend to underwhelm on systems in the budget category. That said, you’re paying a premium for the perks.

Two questions: What the heck is an Erebus? And how the heck is this system so fast?

According to Greek mythology, Erebus is the “personification of darkness.” We would have guessed that it was something related to Nike, given the crazy speeds of iBuyPower’s Erebus GT. The competition at the top of the performance PC chart is pretty tight in terms of general performance, but the Erebus GT shines in plenty of other areas, too: Killer gaming capabilities combine with a beautiful, easy-to-access, water-cooled interior and every modern connection type you might think to plug in.

The Acer AX1930-UR10P is a bit of a bore: Its Sandy Bridge-based speed is the only element we truly enjoy on this $500 desktop, as the rest of what Acer brings to the table is unexciting--even when we factor in the typical constraints of budget desktops.

The AX1930’s Intel Core i3-2120 CPU delivers two cores of processing power (expanded to four with the chip’s built-in hyperthreading) at a clock speed of 3.3GHz. That, coupled with four gigabytes of memory, does much to help the AX1930 achieve great scores for the budget category on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests. In fact, its score of 136 is right up there with some of the best budget desktops we’ve tested with a comparable price.

The name “V3 Salvo 3D” should evoke thoughts of tubes, crazy lights, and an eye-popping price tag—all staple elements of the performance PC category’s gamer-friendly rigs. But V3’s $1199 system (as of 3/19/2012 and as configured) is a bit humbler—a fairly standard PC that delivers a fairly strong showing (for its price) in the gaming arena.

A self-contained Asetek LCLC cooling system helps the Salvo 3D's Core i5-2500K processor reach an overclock of 4.7GHz—a huge bounce from the chip’s 3.3GHz stock clock. The V3 Salvo 3D also takes advantage of Intel's Smart Response Technology, coupling a 32GB solid-state drive and a one-terabyte hard drive, where the SSD serves as a giant, speedy cache to complement the mechanical drive. The V3 Salvo 3D performs admirably on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests with an overall score of 169, but that’s a score that lines up against relatively low-priced performance PC competitors such as iBuyPower’s Gamer Paladin HS11 ($999) and Lenovo’s IdeaCentre K330 ($999).

LG introduced today today the Optimus Vu, a combo tablet-smartphone LTE device with a 5-inch display to support easier multimedia viewing and ebook reading.  

The Optimus Vu will be on display at the Mobile World Congress next week and will be introduced in Korea in March, LG representatives say; no global availability or pricing was disclosed.

Exploits. Sometimes, they break games in your favor, allowing you access to powers, abilities, and cheap ways to accomplish difficult tasks that a game’s developers didn’t intend for you to have (and a game’s testers somehow overlooked). But these exploits can sometimes turn the tables against your peaceful adventures--especially in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft or EVE Online, where game-breaking bugs can give your peers untold advantage over your hapless, plays-by-the-rules self.

And then there are the exploits that are just downright funny.

The iBuyPower Gamer Paladin HS11 is a performance-class PC that produces excellent general and gaming speeds for a picture-perfect price ($999 as of January 5, 2012). But the Paladin has a few drawbacks, as it forces potential purchasers to pick between killer gaming graphics and stronger support for high-definition content.

On the Gamer Paladin HS11, you’ll find an Intel Core i5-2500K processor running at 3.3GHz, teamed up with 8GB of DDR3-1600 memory. And as you might have guessed by the clock speed, this system zipped along on all of the general-performance tasks that make up our WorldBench 6 series of tests. With a final score of 161, it isn’t the best in the performance-PC category, but it gives similarly priced systems (such as the $1200 Micro Express MicroFlex 68B and its score of 184) a run for their money--talk about an excellent price-to-performance ratio.

For a system priced at a cool $1000 (technically, $999 as of 1/3/2012; the price may drop), you’d expect a desktop PC--and a compact PC, no less--to come with some bells and whistles. But the only sound we hear coming from Polywell’s ITX-Z6800 is one of raw performance. Don’t get us wrong: We love a speedy system. However, the market is cluttered with Compact and Budget PC contenders that offer a lot more than what the ITX-Z6800 delivers in total.

Polywell stashes the lower-power variant of Intel’s Core i7-2600 CPU into this 8-by-8-by-3.5-inch system. This gives the ITX-Z6800 a bit of an advantage on cooling due to the lower power draw, as the i7-2600S CPU runs at 2.8GHz versus the i7-2600’s full 3.4GHz, helping this compact PC run a little quieter during normal operation. But, as hinted above, the ITX-Z6800 is no slouch in the performance department: Intel’s Turbo Boost feature allows the i7-2600S to jump up to a clock speed of 3.8GHz when necessary. And this flexibility really comes across on our WorldBench 6 suite of tests, where the ITX-Z68’s speeds deliver a superhigh score of 147.