One thing I often hear when it comes to our gaming coverage is that our readers want us to devote more time to PC gaming. Who can blame you? Ars Technica's earliest days saw you guys obsessing with squeezing every frame possible from the epic Abit BH6 or some 3dfx silicon. My own roots are in PC gaming, too. The point is, PC gaming should always have a strong focus here, and today we're pleased to say that we're strengthening it. It's the right time!

The world of PC gaming is in an amazing place right now, as multiple new engines will hit the scene alongside massive big-name games. There's a new Battlefield game coming out using the new Frostbite engine. RAGE is coming alongside a new engine from id. And that's just the beginning; this is the time to upgrade to make sure we're ready for these new games.

The purpose of this post is twofold. In a moment, we're going to introduce our new standardized game testing rig. But before that, a brief word about what we're going to play and review. The truth is, you don't need an amazing PC to play great PC games. We'll continue to review games of all sorts, at all price levels. But the greatest thing about PC gaming is, in our view, the eye candy. Sure, PC games often have better mods than their console counter parts, but we're really smitten with pushing games to their limit at 1920x1200 and beyond. For that, we needed a new PC.

Rather than build our own, this time we reached out to Velocity Micro and asked them to put together a machine that would be modest, but awesome. Modestly awesome, if you will. The result was a slightly modified Edge Z55, the details of which I've posted below. I've had it for about a week, and I love it. Why Velocity Micro? We have more than one satisfied customer on staff, so we called someone we trust. The machine will go back to Velocity Micro when we are finished with it, and no money has exchanged hands. Now, let's look at the rig:

(Rig stats updated slightly 9/17/2012)

The Rig: Velocity Micro Edge Z55

Intel® Core i7 2700k processor, Hyperclocked

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Rev2 CPU Heatsink

Patriot 8GB 1600Mhz PXD38G1600LLK Memory

Asus P8Z68-V Pro Gen3 Motherboard

Corsair Professional Series HX1050 Power Supply

Bigfoot Networks KillerNIC K2100

EVGA GTX580 1536MB 015-P3-150-AR

Patriot 120GB Wildfire SATAIII SSD PW120GS25SSDR in RAID 0

Hitachi 1 TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive for Storage

LG UH12LS28 BDROM/DVDRW

Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium 64-bit

The specs only tell half the story in this case. The aluminum case is attractive without being overly flashy, and the fans are nearly silent, even when playing games that are putting heavy pressure on the machine. The internals are clean, and the wiring is everything you'd want from a boutique computer. The SSDs keep everything snappy and responsive. This is a machine that chews through all the modern games with ease, and is more than ready for what's coming down the line. And that was the point: pick one machine and stick with it for many moons.

The last thing I want to do is make this post sound like we're just asking you to look at our new shiny toy, so let's put this in concrete terms: we're going to cover Skyrim on PC. We're going to review Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3 on the PC. We're going to review Metro: Last Light on the PC. We'll be reviewing RAGE on the PC. These are games that deserve to be played and reviewed on our favorite platform, and now we'll be able to do exactly that. I'll be contacting publishers, but if they don't listen, we'll buy the games ourselves. I don't care if the reviews are late: these are games we won't be playing on consoles.

In the meantime, if you'd like us to review something on the PC, or take a look at a hot new independent game, simply tell us! You're going to see more games reviewed and covered for the PC, and we'd love to know if you think we've missed something.