In other words, what’s considered a top-of-the-line computer in present day? Knowing that would give you a measuring stick you could use to measure your computer, or a potential new computer, and so forth.

Now, even though laptops have come a long way in terms of performance in the last few years, and even though a top-of-the-line powerful laptop will outperform most desktops, a top-of-the-line desktop will still outperform its equivalent in laptop form.

Due to its performance-demanding nature, computers designed to run high-end games are the best performance computers. Therefore top-of-the-line computers are synonym with gaming computers. Two brands are generally agreed upon as being the best gaming computers: Sager, and Alienware.

I’m slightly slanted towards Alienware, so let’s see what their top of the line gaming computer is like: first, the current fastest CPU is the Intel i7 980X. It boasts six cores. If you don’t know what that means, let me give you an idea. You have probably heard about the dual-core CPUs that came out a few years ago. They were succeeded by quadruple core CPUs not too long ago. The i7 980X CPU, which came out late last year has, not two, not four, but six processors clocked at 3.73 GHz. That’s an immense amount of processing power. So, the Alienware Area-51 model can be configured to have the i7 980X CPU. It can also be configured to have up to 12 Gb of RAM, a dual dedicated graphics processing unit cards setup, a dual solid-state drive hard disks setup (a solid-state hard disk drive doesn’t have moving parts like a conventional hard disk drive and its access time to read and write is far superior than traditional, spinning hard disks),  Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit operating system (regular, 32-bit operating systems cannot handle more than around 3 Gb of Ram so a 64-bit version is what’s needed to be able to handle the 12 Gb of Ram).

So there you have it. How much for the above monster? at the time of this writing it retails for about $5,800.

Of course an expert could build a custom computer from scratch and get the same performance specifications for less cost. But with no disrespect to custom builders, I’ve found from experience that custom built computers are harder to provide support to than mainstream systems. And generally speaking, there is a well-known triangle in the custom builders’ world (and not just on building computers; I learned it while indulging in the hobby of custom car modifications) that has Performance, Reliability and Cost at its vertexes. In other words, The more performance, the less reliability. Lots of performance while maintaining some reliability will give you high cost. With little expense, don’t hope for much performance or reliability. You get the idea.

OK so now let’s see if you actually read this article. How many hyphens in it? 🙂