PC Hardware Buyer's Guide October 2010

Premium Player October 2010

When only the best will do, there’s a great choice of hardware out there to cater for your needs, providing premium performance for a premium price tag. However, even with a high budget, we’re not out to waste money - building a top-end system isn’t as simple as just buying the most expensive components out there and slinging them all together. If you’ve just bought that 24in or 30in monitor, surround sound speaker kit and nice comfy leather chair with footrest (or sub as it's also known) and are looking for some kick-ass performance that won't wait for anyone, this is what we consider the very best hardware at the moment.

New This Month

For those of you looking to make a premium rig, very little has changed in the last month. None of the cases we’ve seen since last time are as pretty or as effective as the incumbent SilverStone FT02R-W and since little else has been released at the top end of the market everything else remains as it is too.

The only fly in the ointment might be that the special-edition FT02R-W (note the R) was a limited production run, so you might have to settle for an FT02 in the standard black or silver. The case is identical apart from the colour change though, so you'll get the same great curves and brilliant cooling.


A few prices have changed in our shopping however, with the excellent Thermaltake Frio creeping up by a fiver, a move which is counteracted by the £5 drop in the 128GB Crucial C300 SSD. Our recommended PSU, the beautifully named XFX Black Edition P1-750B-NLG9, has also had the grace to drop in price by a tenner.

And The Rest

The choice of which CPU to opt for is always tricky, especially as AMD has a range of six-core Phenom II X6 CPUs, while Intel has its quad-core (eight-thread) Core i7 series and its ludicrous six-core (12-thread) Core i7-980X Extreme Edition. The reviews show that the AMD Phenom X6 II 1090T Black Edition just doesn't cut it against the Core i7-930 (let alone the i7-980X) unless you’re doing some highly multi-threaded work in specific applications. For bags of speed in pretty much every department and use, the Core i7-930 is the better bet for around £250.

The argument as to whether you should choose a Core i7-920 or an i7-930 continues. We've listed the i7-930 because there's no telling when the cheaper and only slightly less overclockable i7-920 will disappear from the shelves.

While we’d all like to have a i7-980X in our PC, the extra two cores over the i7-930 only help in certain applications – again, heavily multi-threaded semi-pro types of use. So, while the CPU is certainly desirable, it’s not actually all that useful for many of us, making the £800-odd asking price too large to swallow.


We’ve picked to seat our i7-930 in the the Asus P6X58D-E but there is also an argument for using the excellent Gigabyte X58A-UD3R. Both boards are excellent and would form the basis of a reliable, quick PC, they’re also identically priced so it really is just a matter of personal choice which you go for. We’ve opted for the Asus board as its lack if IDE port isn’t a problem for a fresh build and we think it looks better.

Our premium player PC is housed in the arrestingly beautiful SilverStone FT02R-W which, as a bonus, is also ace at cooling even a monster PC. This is due to a combination of the excellent Air Penetrator fans the case uses and its quirky rotated motherboard tray, a feature which is sure to make your killer PC a talking point. The bad news for US readers is that the special edition, red R-W version we reviewed isn’t available in North America yet, so they’re stuck with the equally impressive but less visually distinctive black B-W version for the time being.

When it comes to LGA1366, we’d always prefer 6GB of memory over 3GB if possible, so we’ve gone for 6GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 RAM. The relatively high frequency will give us a bit more headroom when it comes to overclocking. For example, if we wanted to aim for a 4GHz overclock we’d use a QPI of 191MHz (as 191 x 21 = 4,011). If we’d opted for 1,333MHz memory, we’d have to use the 6x memory strap with this QPI, which would give us a memory frequency of 1,146MHz, which is a touch slow. With the 1,600MHz memory, we can safely use the 8x memory strap and have our memory run at a more healthy 1,528MHz. We wouldn’t recommend overclocking 1,333MHz memory to 1,528MHz for everyday use unless you really know your DRAM.

For storage, we’ve gone for a single 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard disk and a 128GB Crucial C300 SSD. We’d install Windows, games and slow-loading applications to the SSD, and everything else to the Samsung hard disk.

We’ve also added an Asus Xonar DX sound card to avoid conflicts with the Realtek audio codec of the motherboard and enhance the sound generally. If you're really into your audio, you might want to consider replacing the Asus Xonar DX with the Asus Xonar Xense Audio Bundle. It's finally on sale and at under £200 it's worth looking considering.


Our sister mag Custom PC recently recommended the 750W XFX Black Edition P1-750B-NLG9, which its Premium Grade award (obviously for its price and performance, rather than its name). To quote the review: 'at just over £100, the 750W XFX Black Edition...is great value for money. If you're in the market for a 700-799W PSU then it should be at the top of your shopping list.'.

The CPU cooler we’ve chosen is the Thermaltake Frio which blasted through our thermal benchmarks. With both its fans installed its one of the best cooler we’ve ever seen.

To round things off, there’s a cheap SATA DVD drive. If you haven't got a copy already, you should factor in a copy of Windows 7 - if you're confident that you won't be upgrading much, then an OEM copy should be fine, but serial upgraders need the pricier retail version.