What Hardware Should I Buy? - July 2009

Gaming Workhorse

While our enthusiast system is built around maximising overclocking and gaming potential on a budget, those looking to maximise gaming performance and do a tonne of multi-tasking will absolutely find it necessary to pick up a quad-core CPU, which is what we’ve built our gaming workhorse system around.

This system also offers much better stock performance than our enthusiast system for those who parallel task or video encode (for example), but of course this increase in performance and functionality out of the box means a noticeably higher price tag. While there’s still plenty of overclocking headroom here if you’re not too confident when it comes to overclocking we’d point you in this direction.

In addition to the nippy quad core and high end cooling we’ve again included a high end GPU, although deciding between Nvidia’s GTX 275 and ATI’s HD 4890 1GB is difficult, as both provide very similar graphics headroom at a very similar price. Whichever you choose will deliver fantastic gaming performance.

Graphics Card

First Choice: GeForce GTX 275
UK Pricing: £165.08 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $219.99 (ex. Tax)

We wanted to include the Sapphire Radeon HD 4890 1GB Atomic with its 1GHz core clock but these seem to be rarer than a Michael Jackson memorial ticket right now. Instead we found the Zotac GeForce GTX 275 AMP! with its very inexpensive price of £165 and combined with a pre-overclock of seven to 11 percent (core and memory) it's also faster than most 275s out the box as well.

For the price it's notably better than a GeForce GTX 260 and Radeon HD 4870 1GB, and it's even cheaper than the Palit GTX 275 with aftermarket cooler now, so for gaming up to 1,920 x 1,200 resolution (around 24in monitor size), the GTX 275 is a great buy for a nose over £165.

For our States side readers, we've opted for an EVGA equivalent that, while without the same pre-overclock, has an excellent customer service and as usual a "lifetime" (10 year) warranty and step up program.

CPU

First Choice: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650
UK Pricing: £239.13 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $311.00 (ex. Tax)

The Q9650 may be an expensive quad core but the E0 stepping makes for a superb overclocker. In issue 68 of Custom PC magazine, the guys found it could easily achieve far in excess of the Q9550 - hitting almost 4GHz on a good P45 board. With that in mind, we think that despite the fact it costs more than the competing Core i7 920, the LGA775 platform is still cheaper so it makes for a fantastic buy.

Despite LGA775 coming close to the end of its life in terms of performance and with Lynnfield right around the corner, there is a strong question as to whether it is just worth waiting until September, however if you absolutely must buy now - we strongly recommend the Q9650 E0 as the way to go.

Motherboard

First Choice: Biostar TPower i45
UK Pricing: £103.29 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $159.99 (ex. Tax)

The Biostar TPower i45 is another Custom PC recommendation because despite the fact it's feature light when compared to Asus and Gigabyte in the P45 front, it is happy to do ludicrous front side bus speeds - making it an ideal partner to really push the Q9650 above. At just £100 it's also an incredible bargain too, offsetting the cost of the Q9650 and making the overall platform cheaper.

With six SATA, onboard power and reset buttons, as well as CrossFire support (although not with the card we recommended here), not to mention the insane cooling for the heatpipes makes it a very capable board for the price.

Memory

First Choice: 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1200MHz C5
UK Pricing: £60.82 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $83.99 (ex. Tax)

The bare minimum of memory you should be putting into a high-end PC is 4GB, especially as the performance advantage is fairly significant over 2GB, especially in the majority of modern games. We've opted for hefty 1,200MHz DDR2 memory here at a slight premium to go with the Q9650 and Biostar board because it offers the maximum available performance overhead to dive into, while still keeping with cheaper DDR2.

For those not interested in overclocking the memory, DDR2 1,066MHz is £20 cheaper, so the option to opt for that and save some cash is still available.