AVADirect Mini Gaming PC: Titan in a Small Package

Name: AVADirect Mini Gaming PC with GeForce GTX Titan
Brand: AVADirect

by Joshua Gulick — Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 01:00 PM EDT

Performance Summary: As you can see, NVIDIA's GeForce GTX Titan gives AVADirect’s new Mini Gaming PC some serious firepower. It offers extremely high frame rates for most games and strong frame rates in the latest titles, as well. It proves that an SFF (Small Form Factor) PC is perfectly capable of giving you an excellent gaming experience, given the right components.

We have a lot of good things to say about AVADirect’s Mini Gaming PC, but we should also note one problem we encountered. As benchmarking got underway, the system occasionally crashed. Sometimes, it would freeze in the middle of a benchmark – at others, it would blue screen and restart. The system provided strong scores, but its stability obviously wasn’t acceptable for a customer. We contacted AVADirect to see how their technical support staff handled the situation and one of its tech support personnel walked us through several troubleshooting steps. He struck us as knowledgeable and professional, and didn’t waste time with unnecessary testing. He eventually settled on the SSD as a possible culprit. The company’s policy would be (with a customer) to replace the drive and continue troubleshooting if that didn’t solve the problem.

Given the system’s performance and the way AVADirect handled the situation, we’re comfortable recommending the AVA Mini Gaming PC. Problems are bound to arise occasionally, and having the personnel and policies in place to support the customer is critical to a system builder’s reputation. Like a customer, we'd prefer to not have to enlist the help of an OEM's technical support staff, but when we do, it's good to see that they're competent and professional.

Going beyond gaming performance, the AVADirect Mini Gaming PC is a great choice for LAN parties. Although it’s not quite as small as the Maingear Potenza, it’s easy to carry and won’t take up much space at your table. The Prodigy case gives it killer looks and the Titan, of course, is one of the most powerful and power-efficient graphics cards on the market. The performance and polish together make this Mini Gaming PC a worthy system, though we're hopeful AVA roots out the issue we observed and eliminates it with future test flows.


Small, sleek, stylish chassis Strong performance for an SFF Excellent cable management, clean build No bloatware	The rails that serve as feet don't appear as strong as standard case feet. Our review system experienced some crashing likely due to a failing SSD component.

Tags: core i7, Gaming PC, AVADirect, Ivy Bridge, BitFenix, Titan

Joshua Gulick

Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.