Playing The Gaming PC Market

The market, of course, has been hot for some time. For evidence, there is Dell's acquisition of Alienware last year followed by Hewlett-Packard's purchase of Voodoo Computers. The specter of the top two PC makers snapping up the two hottest brands in gaming may have led some to wonder whether this niche may be getting a little too hot for smaller competitors.

But no market may be better suited for custom-built systems than gaming, where brand often takes a backseat to cool, and with the launch of Vista, custom-system builders are continuing to develop their own places in the market.

AVADirect is one of those companies looking to take a bite out of the multibillion-dollar pie. The Twinsburg, Ohio-based system builder recently opened a new warehouse to give it space to expand its custom gaming PC business. Each of its seven technicians spends about two days on a custom machine, and AVADirect reports that it is selling between 50 and 60 custom gaming machines each month.

""We take every single computer we sell pretty personally," said Alex Sonis, president of AVADirect. Customers can order customized computers, complete with colored lights or fans, with as much memory as they want. Sonis thinks this is what will help take the $8 million system builder to the next level.

"We give them something to make it custom, completely custom both lookwise and performancewise," he said. "If they have something they want to have in their computer, we can do it for them. With us there are no limits, and I think that's the niche of our company."

Right now, 80 percent of AVADirect's sales are desktop machines, with the other 20 percent coming from laptops and servers. Sixty percent of the company's orders come through its Web site. Customers can choose between Microsoft's Windows XP and Vista operating systems, but "right now most people pick Vista because it's the new thing," Sonis said.

Falcon Northwest, a longtime gaming system builder in Medford, Ore., has been seeing 20 percent to 30 percent growth annually and it expects Vista to open up new sales opportunities this year, said Brad Berdelman, general manager. "Obviously, the Vista launch has been pretty big with enthusiasts of gaming," Berdelman said. "It's really going to gain some steam. It's really going to push the market for us. ... For the first part of this year, people have been pretty hesitant about Vista, but I think it's going to be helpful for growth going forward."

Key to that, he said, is Microsoft's Games for Windows initiative, which certifies games for compatibility and performance. Vista also comes with a utility that rates computer performance on a scale of 1 to 6, which helps resellers demonstrate how much horsepower their systems really have.

In addition to Vista, customers are asking for more memory. While the average system ships with 2 Gbytes of RAM, customers are frequently requesting 4-Gbyte and sometimes 8-Gbyte systems, Berdelman said.

"The hardware is always driving it. Most of the people who are gamers are enthusiasts at heart so they enjoy the launches of things like quad-core processors. Any time we have a refresh like this, it keeps the enthusiast interested. They look to upgrade their systems or purchase new ones," he said.

Next: Gaming PCs hold their own vs. notebooks