iBuyPower Gamer Paladin F860-A

The Cooler Master HAF 932 case offers a great mixture of screw-free upgradability, extensive front-panel connectivity, and unique features--such as a rubber-covered, water-cooling fill hole on the top of the case. Too bad iBuyPower decided to paint the Gamer Paladin F860-a's chassis with an eye-straining red-and-black theme. The black base and red accents look great if you're staring at the case head-on, but the side paneling's solid red might be too much for your home office or dorm room to handle.

Our system arrived with two LG Electronics optical drives in place--a Blu-ray and HD DVD-ROM drive and a standard DVD burner. The chassis has room for four additional 5.25-inch externally accessible devices as well, and five more hard drives can fit into the system's easy-to-use internal 3.5-inch drive trays. A single PCI Express x4 slot joins two free PCI Express x16 slots and one PCI connection for all your motherboard add-ons. As shipped, the case's excellent wiring job provided plenty of room for airflow and for new hardware installation.

Though it lacks an HDMI connection, the Gamer Paladin F860-a can accommodate most external devices on both the front and the rear of its chassis. On the back, you get eight USB 2.0, one FireWire 400 port, one eSATA port, two gigabit ethernet connections, optical and coaxial SPDIF, and integrated 5.1 surround sound. On the front, five USB 2.0 ports are joined by a single FireWire 400 port, an eSATA port, and a media card reader. Few systems offer this much connectivity.

iBuyPower bundled a couple of rather lackluster input devices with this PC: a generic-looking two-button mouse and a 104-button keyboard, both from Logitech. Neither is a worthy companion for a system built for gaming.

The Gamer Paladin F860-a aims for the look of a high-end gaming PC, and it succeeds on some fronts--connectivity, upgradability, and chassis design (minus the paint job). But it fails to deliver on what matters most. For general-purpose usability and gaming, we've seen better performance by more-affordable power PCs, let alone by the ferocious combatants at the top of our gaming PC charts.