iBuyPower continues to show off its fluency in connections by offering three USB ports and an eSATA port in addition to a multiformat card reader on the system's front. That's but a mere whistle-whetting for what awaits users on the Paladin's rear, however. You'll find six USB ports, two USB 3.0 ports, one eSATa port, one FireWire 400 port, an optical SPDIF port, a gigabit ethernet port, and connections for integrated 7.1 surround sound.

Built-in Bluetooth and ROG Connect -- a fancy ASUS-only connector that allows one to control a system's overclocks when connected to another ROG Connect-friendly PC -- are two connections that are indeed rare to the power PC charts. The system's pair of video cards support a total of four DVI connections and two HDMI connections. Except for its lack of DisplayPort, we can't think of anything else we'd want to see on a system.

We like iBuyPower's six-core Paladin XLC; we truly do. The few changes we'd make on the system are mostly akin to putting a few pebbles on top of a stone wall -- the Paladin XLC is that strong as a performance PC (save for perhaps its missing brick of gaming speeds). However, the system's price just can't be ignored. We don't base our scoring on the cost of the PCs we review, but we would be remiss if we didn't mention that faster (and similarly tricked-out) systems like the V3 Convoy offer a pretty compelling experience for less. The Paladin XLC may be a formidable fighter, but it would appear that the sun is setting on Intel's stalwart six-core CPU.