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Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide: Desktops
Welcome to the Engadget Holiday Gift Guide! The team here is well aware of the heartbreaking difficulties of the seasonal shopping experience, and we want to help you sort through the trash and come up with the treasures this year. Below is today's bevy of hand curated picks, and you can head back to the Gift Guide hub to see the rest of the product guides as they're added throughout the holiday season. Desktops don't get much love these days, what with newfangled "laptops" hogging all the spotlight, but it's still an incredibly vibrant category, full of cutthroat competition, insanely powerful computers, and superfluous LED lighting. The result is tons of hot deals, particularly if you don't mind bringing your own monitor, wrangling wires behind an entertainment center, or being chained to a desk. In return you'll get performance that simply isn't possible on a laptop, expandability should you choose take advantage of it, and so many hot deals. Follow along after the break as we show you some of our favorites.
Dell sticks AMD's latest crop inside new Dell Studio XPS 7100 line
Dell's wasting no time appropriating AMD's new Phenom II X6 chips, pushing out a brand new Studio XPS line to deal with the new top of the line (and a few quad cores as well) from "that other processor company." While AMD can crow about having more cores at a mid-range price, Dell isn't trying to pass these off as pure competition for Intel's brood: the Studio XPS 7100 line is AMD-only, while the Core i-based Studio XPS 8100 desktops are a clear step up model number-wise. The 7100 baseline system, with integrated graphics, goes for $699, but Dell's doing this with an enthusiast slant, packing in a 460 watt power supply to power up some fancy graphics and giving hardcore users room to grow. We got to check out a $1,199 system running the AMD Phenom II X6 1050T, which is supposed to be somewhat comparable to an Intel Core i5 760, and paired up with ATI Radeon HD 5870 graphics and 6GB of RAM the machine makes for a pretty tight gaming rig. Unfortunately, AMD's top-of-line 5970 graphics are being held for the Studio XPS 8100, and AMD's best new X6 chip, the 1090T (roughly a Core i7 870), won't be available from Dell until this summer. Still, if you're looking for a nice balance between price and performance, AMD and Dell might have something to offer with this new understated desktop setup. %Gallery-92820%
