With prices ranging from £1199 to £1649 there's plenty to choose from in this month's selection of best gaming PCs. See also: gaming PC buying advice and our latest gaming PC group test.
Even the least expensive model from Chillblast will offer a very satisfying gaming experience thanks to an overclocked Core i5-3570K processor and a pair of lower-cost graphics cards which team up to deliver very respectable gaming framerates.
Paying the top-end price tag of £1649 for Dino PC's Angry Lizard 3770K will get you many extras, including a more powerful CPU and serious gaming peripherals in the form of Saitek's Cyborg V7 keyboard and Rat 3 mouse. It also comes with a gaming sound card and plug-in Wi-Fi card – not to mention excellent gaming performance from its factory-overclocked nVidia GeForce GTX 680 graphics card.
Between these two extremes there are plenty of options, whether you favour AMD or nVidia graphics. You also need to make a decision to choose between a TN or IPS monitor. Serious gamers may prefer the faster response time of a TN panel, but we think the majority of users won't notice the difference and will instead prefer the vastly improved image quality of an IPS display.
Although CPU power is important for gaming, the graphics card will have by far the greatest effect on your framerates and will probably be the most expensive component in your system. You should therefore make sure the graphics performance reaches the level you require before looking at the quality of external peripherals.
YoyoTech's Warbird Titatnium Pro looks very inexpensive considering it offers the fastest overall performance by some considerable margin. However, this price is for the base system only and you'll have to add on the cost of a monitor, keyboard and mouse when comparing it against the other systems. This would amount to around £150-£250 if you're thinking of buying peripherals comparable to the other systems in the group test.
