Everybody wants to be the best, especially in PC gaming, where performance commands premium prices, and boutique vendors race to build systems with the hottest hardware every time a new part is released. It's a constant race to claim the title of most powerful gaming PC, and the latest entrant is the Digital Storm Coridium a premium-priced high-end gaming desktop that pushes the envelope further than any system before. AMD's cutting-edge graphics card, the dual-chip Radeon R9 295X2, is the latest ammunition in the ongoing battle for faster, more powerful gaming rigs, and the Coridium boasts two of the beasts, plus an overclocked hex-core Intel Core i7 processor. The result is ridiculous power—enough to enjoy gaming on multiple 4K monitors—but it costs a whopping $7,779 (as tested). If you're looking for the fastest gaming rig around, and don't mind spending as much as a used Toyota Corolla, the Coridium is our new Editors' Choice for high-end gaming desktops.

Design and Features
The Coridium is built inside a Corsair Obsidian Series 450D chassis, which features a steel body, a brushed-aluminum the front panel, and a large, acrylic side window for showing off what's under the hood. The whole thing measures 19.44 by 8.26 by 19.56 inches (HWD), putting it squarely in the midtower category, and not so big as to overcrowd a desk. For this build, Digital Storm has slightly modified the front panel, filling the two drive bays with a tray-loading optical drive (12x Blu-ray and DVD writer/reader), and the front of a cooling reservoir for Digital Storm's own HydroLux liquid cooling system. Also on the front of the case is a Power button, two USB 3.0 ports, separate jacks for a headphone and microphones, and a Reset button.

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Around the back of the tower, you'll find plenty of connections,
with nine USB ports (four USB 3.0, five USB 2.0), one dedicated port for BIOS Flash, and two USB/eSATA combination ports. There's a PS/2 port for older gaming peripherals, and a FireWire 400 port, along with Gigabit Ethernet, S/PDIF for digital surround sound, and other standard audio ports. There are two graphics cards inside, combining to offer two DVI-D outputs and eight mini DisplayPorts.

Open up the left side of the case, and you'll find an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard, set up for overclocking and outfitted with an Intel Core i7-4930K hex-core processor overclocked to 4.6GHz. Right next to the CPU you'll find not one, but two giant AMD Radeon R9 295X2 graphics cards, dual-chip cards built for blazing graphics performance at 4K resolution. With two dual-chip cards in Quad-Crossfire configuration, there's a lot of hardware between you and the motherboard, but we could see that our review unit came with 16GB of RAM, with four 4GB sticks of 1866MHz Corsair Vengeance Pro RAM filling four of the eight available slots.

All of this high-powered hardware generates a lot of heat and demands a lot of power. The two graphics cards have built-in liquid cooling, so each card has tubing and a radiator to contend with, in addition to the overclocked processor, which is cooled with its own Digital Storm HydroLux cooler, with its radiator positioned just below the optical drive. It's a mess of tubing, and while it's surprisingly quiet, it will complicate any maintenance work or upgrades inside the case. Then there are the power requirements; the overclocked hex-core processor needs a lot of juice, but the pair of AMD R9 295X2 cards have heavy power demands and specific support requirements. As such, the Coridium is powered by a 1,500-watt Silverstone power supply.