Price isn't a factor during our reviews here at PCWorld, nor does it determine what category a particular machine falls into -- that's largely determined by hardware. Machines with six-core processors (or four cores and 8 threads, care of hyper-threading on Intel's higher end Core i7 CPUs), oodles of RAM, and top-tier GPUs will generally fit the bill. But all that hardware generally pushes machines over the edge. We've seen PCs in this price-range before -- , for example -- but you're generally going to expect sacrifices.

The new Genesis Midtower stands out, delivering the expected high-tier experience at a price tag than quite honestly feels like a typo.

Under the hood: a second-generation Core i7-2600K processor, overclocked to an impressive 4.7GHz, a pair of 640GB hard drives in RAID 0, 4GB of DDR3-1333MHz RAM, and an Nvidia Geforce GTX 570 graphics card. A humble load out for the Performance category -- a little light on RAM, and quite light on storage -- but the test results allay concerns: it earned a 186 on our WorldBench 6 test suite.

That score puts the new Origin Genesis Midtower well ahead of anything in its price range on the . It topples most of the Performance chart's offerings too, currently outpaced by its, and Maingear's $8000 .

Games performance comes care of -- a single GPU, but a capable one. It saw an average of 81 frames per second on our Call of Duty 4 test, and an average of 222 frames per second on Dirt 2.