Oh yeah, you've options oozing everywhere for a bona fide gaming desktop that takes up some serious square footage in your domicile, but what about those looking for a potent portable? And we're not talking laptops, either. Falcon Northwest's FragBox 8500 -- which sports a chassis that hasn't changed much in years -- was recently reviewed by the folks over at PC Magazine, and put simply, it was deemed a "game system without apologies." Checking in at $1,895, critics found the internals to be "neatly put together," the unit as a whole satisfactorily mobile and yes, they confirmed that "you will definitely be able to play the DX10-heavy versions of Crysis and World in Conflict at very decent frame rates." Did you hear that? They said Crysis. Head on down to the read link for the full review of the Editors' Choice-awarded machine.

Falcon Northwest has unveiled the FragBook TLX which, as you can probably tell by the name, targets Falcon's traditional audience of hardcore gamers. Similar to its FragBook desktop replacement brethren, the TLX is based around a 17-inch, 1680 x 1050 LCD; but unlike the DR model, the TLX has a relatively diminutive design. At only 1.5-inches thick and weighing 7-pounds, it's certainly not what you'd call an ultraportable, but then again, most ultraportables don't feature the TLX's 2.33GHz Core 2 Duo processor, up to 160GB of hard drive storage and 2GB of RAM, nor the nVIDIA GeForce 7600 GO graphics card with 256MB of video RAM. The combination of thinness and performance doesn't come cheap though, as the starting price of the TLX is $3,516. Those of you who really want to burn money -- and be able to prove that you did so -- can opt for an optional flame painted color scheme for $426.

[Via Techie Diva]

ExtremeTech and Games for Windows magazine have combined their forces to take on a few of the ultimate gaming machines that are tearing up the scene these days. Over the last week, they rocked six, that's right, six full-on reviews of these rapacious rigs: the Dell XPS 710, Gateway FX530XT Gaming PC, CyberPower Gamer Infinity SLI KO, Alienware Area-51 ALX, Falcon Northwest Mach V, and VoodooPC Omen (pictured).

First up is the Dell XPS 710, which really didn't get high marks at all -- they dubbed it a "very average system." What made it deserve such a panning? Basically, the site found that it's overpriced ($5,314) for the performance you get (2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme Quad QX6700) -- Dell seems to have spent the extra money on case design and not the actual components. When stacked up against a very close rival, the Gateway FX530XT, ExtremeTech found that the 530 edged out the Dell system, earning points for a faster chip (3.24GHz QX6700 quad-core), smaller case, lower price ($4,030), and quieter fan. Keep reading to check out the rest of the hardcore action...

Intel fanboys will be delighted -- and AMD should be a little worried -- to know that the fine folks at PC Mag have nothing but positive things to say about Falcon Northwest's new Core 2 Extreme (formerly named "Conroe") toting Mach V. The specs are impressive all around, including two 10,000RPM 150GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration, 2GB RAM and two ATI X1900 3D cards, but the real news here is how much of an improvement they saw over the older, AMD-based systems. Many of PC Mag's old benchmark records were crushed, with the Mach V suffering its only defeat at the hands of one of Polywell's quad SLI machines in the Doom 3 test. If that wasn't impressive enough, the addition of a liquid-cooling system also helps this gaming rig run cooler and much quieter than previous versions. As you probably could have guessed, all that performance doesn't come cheap, so you'll have to decide for yourself whether or not a fancy paintjob and the ability to run your favorite PC games at 2,560 x 1,600 is worth the $7,000 price. But hey, at least it's not $10,000.