AVADirect Custom comes loaded with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i7 920 chip overclocked to 3.88GHz. AVADirect offers a multitude of options, including a motherboard and case, for its Intel X58 chipset-based Custom Gaming PC.

According to AVADirect, it ensures its systems are stable before they ship out to customers, and that it will follow up on the phone with customers who make mistakes in their online orders. It also has what it calls its certified systems that offer a more restricted option path, and thus less room for error. In general, and this applies to any vendor offering so many hardware options, we recommend these kinds of systems only to those with a certain degree of technical competence.

The cabling, overclocking, and cooling of this system were all expertly done, on par with the build quality of the likes of Falcon Northwest, Maingear, and Velocity Micro. The ThermalTake Element S case is attractive and straightforward enough. The top-mounted USB, eSATA, and audio ports are an easy-to-reach convenient touch; you'll find a Blu-ray, DVD burner, and media card drives behind the front-panel door. We don't find Blu-ray a necessity in a full-tower PC, but it also doesn't hurt. If you're not interested in Blu-ray you can always opt out.

Inside, a blue LED screen is tied into the CoolIT DM-1000 Domino liquid-cooling hardware that displays the CPU temperature and the system fan speed. Despite this extra component, the interior of the Custom Gaming PC is easy to navigate. All of the cables are bound and secured out of the way for easy parts swapping, including the hard-drive cables, which are situated behind the drives, rather than in front. The drive cable inputs aren't anchored to a surface of any kind, so drive removal and reinsertion isn't totally seamless, but we appreciate both the visual appeal and the relative ease of removing a drive with the cables routed behind it.

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