ASUS CM1740-US-2AH Desktop PC A8-Series APU A8-3820(2.50GHz) 6GB DDR3 500GB HDD Capacity AMD Radeon HD 6550D Windows 7 Home Premium 64-Bit

Pros: Nice and quiet, this is a pretty powerful machine. My son said his games quit lagging unless he had minecraft, Yogscast and a few other things running at the same time...Yeah,I've created an 11 yo gamer....I remember the days I had to pedal uphill both ways to get my games to work...So I ended up getting a video card for it: ASUS EAH6670/DIS/1GD5 Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card which came with free Winzip pro16. Nice. No complaints, cheaper than I could build for him and with warrantly. Thanks NE, you rock as always.

Cons: None, still works.

Pros: Fast computer the capability to play games. Installed Skyrim and played at highest setting with no problems. The only problem I have is that I thought this computer was wifi and bluetooth ready, I guess I was wrong because it's not!

Cons: not wifi or bluetooth ready

Pros: Sturdy case, well made side panels. Power button on top center of case is easy to reach, as are USB and headphone/microphone jacks. USB 3.0 great for copying video from HD camcorder in timely fashion. Room to add another pair of memory modules while keeping existing factory memory modules. Plenty of internal expansion options with 6 SATA ports, 2 of which are used for hard disk and optical drive. APU architecture means no video card taking up space in side of case. Room to add 2 additional case fans, one in front and one in rear. APU Heatsink is largish and definitely up to the task. Almost every popular flavor of expansion card slot on motherboard open and ready to be filled. Can upgrade CPU later if your needs grow. Very easy to add aftermarket video card. Room for two more hard disks inside case. If one were to make a gaming machine out of this a bigger power supply would be a good idea. It certainly has the capacity to play some games, even without modifcations

Cons: Only one bay for optical drives and it's occupied by DVD burner. Not a fan of the trend micro security software that came preinstalled. Hard disk only has 16MB of onboard cache so it is the bottleneck for me at the moment. Will likely get a solid state drive later to correct this. Power supply looks generic but only time will tell if it's as well built as the motherboard appears to be. Included mouse and keyboard are not high quality but not super cheap like ones from Acer. Nero software included with warranty and setup poster is not pre-installed. Ran into issues installing nero, not sure if defective media or my anti-virus is blocking it.

Other Thoughts: I like this one better than an extremely similar HP I selected for a relative not 2 weeks ago. Cane with office starter edition but did not include Microsoft power point viewer software. The Asus live update software is set by default to check daily and triggers the Windows user authentication thing where it asks for permission, no problem for me but could annoy those less knowledgeable.