Overclocked AVADirect desktop wins Editors' Choice

We posted a review of an AVADirect Custom Gaming PC yesterday afternoon. With one of the single largest, yet stable, CPU overclocks we've ever seen, this expertly build, attractive, and cost-competitive gaming desktop impressed us enough to earn an Editor's Choice award. You can read the review here (video should post shortly).

As you might note from the lengthy service and support section in the review, AVADirect has something of an image problem online, in particular on the forums at enthusiast site HardOCP. We're not blind to the concerns raised on the HardForum, and we've read through almost all of them. On the flipside, we can't exactly use a few samples from the Web to judge a vendor's entire service and support operation.

We don't want to minimize the legitimate complaints some customers have with AVADirect. We know from experience the frustration of customer service failures. But we also can't ignore the many positive reviews of AVADirect systems on the HardForum, as well as on ResellerRatings.com.

We stand by our decision to award this system an Editors' Choice, but we suspect that might be unpopular with those who have strong feelings about AVADirect. A few folks over at the HardForum have already said as much. The only thing we can say is that the service and support subrating for desktops (in this case a 6), represents only 10 percent of a review score for a reason. We don't want to ignore customers' concerns about a vendor, but for the sake of consistency, fairness, and timeliness, we have to spend most of our energy on the product itself. In the case of this particular configuration from AVADirect, we came away impressed.