Avatar FX6164 Gaming Desktop

My old gaming PC recently went to the silicon scrap yard in the middle of a gaming session. I contemplated building my own again and decided to price out parts. Then, on a whim, I decided to price out pre-built machines. After a lot of searching I came across this gem. I'd never heard of Avatar before, but I've always had good luck with off brands, and the price was fantastic so I went for it. It arrived today in excellent condition.It was packaged appropriately and made the shipping trip without incident. Upon unpacking I was surprised at the weight. It was much lighter than I was expecting. I inspected the exterior and what I could see of the interior through the window and everything looked good. After disconnecting my dead PC, I removed a few parts I wanted to keep, such as the hard drive, case fan and GPU. I opened this case and checked all of the connections (it traveled across the entire country, a little giggling is expected) and everything felt good and connected. I installed my previous case fan on the back vent, which happens to be the identical model case fan as is in the front of the case. Strange coincidence. Everything connected up without incident and fired up perfectly. The system is surprisingly quite for a gaming machine and performs better than expected. Yes, Windows 8 is difficult to navigate, but not impossible. 8.1 is a bit easier to use, but not much.The system is bare bones, which is perfect and exactly what I wanted, but probably not what a general user is looking for. If, however, you want a pre-built, awesome gaming machine as a gaming machine should be, you can't go wrong with this one.

I ordered this baby a month ago, and I have to say, I love it. It's black, the side of the case is clear so you can see the internal workings. It is very fast compared to my old clunker, it works just what I need it for, and I'm able to game like I've always wanted to. The built-in 16GB of RAM also kicks serious ass, and it has 1TB of storage space, what can I say?Now, the cons;First and most importantly, Windows 8... All I can say is "if it ain't broke, then why the f*** would you bother trying to fix it? I'd rip further into Win8, but that is a totally different subject, we're here to talk about the computer.Which leads me to complain about the fact that this newer and more recent desktop computer requires an installation disc instead of having a built-in backup drive like my laptop did. It has been a coon's age since I last owned a more recent desktop, but I am surprised to know that in spite of how far technology has come since, in spite of how much we can fit into small, compact, handheld devices and how much they can do, with mass amounts of data stored on subatomic levels within them, and we STILL need to manually use discs to reinstall their operating system. We live in 2014, and we can prepackage re-installation drives into slim, compact laptops and phones, but not these fat, spacious desktops? Something is wrong here.The next problem I immediately had with this thing was the fact that it required an Ethernet cable to go online, I fixed this by buying a cheap wireless PCI adapterAnother problem I had was the fact that some of my older programs seem to be more prone to crashes on this thing, likely due to the newer OS (which again, I have little love for).One more problem is that it isn't as quiet as I hoped it would be, but it doesn't come close to making the noise my laptop did.Now finally; the dvd drive; I've grown accustomed to the luxury of having a blu-ray capable computer with DVD backwards compatibility, but again, something I can fix on my own budget and time.I'd write a con about the graphics card, but I haven't had any issues with it. I will say that it isn't op notch, but it can run Crysis on High settings and still look appealing to the eyes (I run the demo to test a GPU's mettle). The quality falls short of superb, and I do get a little jitter in some games, but it still runs very well. Again I stress that this is something I can fix on my own in the future.Bottom line, I do highly recommend this computer if you're looking for a cheap desktop with power and performance under $700. It is a good entry-level gamer PC. It does have it's flaws, but these are ones you can fix with your own budget over time. If an internet connection is crucial to you, I do recommend starting with the wireless PCI card though. You can find a good, cheap one here http://www.amazon.com/TRENDnet-Wireless-PCI-Adapter-TEW-643PI/dp/B001FB5TTA/ref=sr_1_28?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1400516536&sr=1-28&keywords=wireless+pci+card

I have used the computer for about a month now and I am very happy with it. The startup is amazingly fast. It starts up faster than my iPad and I thought that was fast. Over the last month, I have been using the computer for editing videos. I am using Pinnacle 17. Other computers that I have used previous versions of the Pinnacle software were very slow. This system is very fast compiling video projects and exporting them as MPEG's.I haven't really used this system for gaming. So, I can't really say how it performs as a gaming system. But, it works great for video and music editing. I would definitely recommend this system for anyone who wants to perform video editing or using any higher end editing tools.As a side note, Windows 8 has take a little getting used to. But, I like the app button look of the Start menu. It makes it easy to create a Start screen with the programs that I use most of the time. Once your click to the desktop, it is just like previous versions of Windows.