Holiday 2011

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.