What Hardware Should I Buy? - March 2009

Graphics Card

Alternative: Nvidia GeForce GTX 295
UK Pricing: £434.70 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $504.99 (ex. Tax)

While the £430 price tag for Nvidia's GeForce GTX 295 is a tough investment to stomach, it is an enormously powerful bit of kit and is the fastest single consumer graphics card you can buy today. Delivering silky smooth frame rates in every modern game regardless of resolution and with multi-GPU scaling that works right down to the lowest resolutions, it's a real monster, but unfortunately all that performance comes at a price.

Even the cheapest GTX 295 is £60 more than a Radeon HD 4870 X2, and while performance is better in most titles, and notably more so in Crysis, the lead isn't so emphatic in other games and lessens the GTX 295's appeal. In addition, actually finding one is a hard task and while at the time of writing we found three relatively cheaper ones in stock in the UK, we doubt they will be there for long.

Nevertheless, if you absolutely, positively have to have the biggest, baddest graphics card in the room then the GeForce GTX 295 is the card to go for.

Case

Alternative: Lian Li V1110
UK Pricing: £198.02 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $284.99 (ex. Tax)

When you buy a premium case, you expect excellent build quality and a whole host of high end features, and that’s exactly what the Lian Li V1110 delivers in spades.

Thanks to a fully compartmentalised cooling system (similar to the Antec P182 and P190's design), which keeps the heat of hard disks and the power supply away from the motherboard and its components, the V1110 is able to run both cool and quiet. While we’ve seen cases perform better, these are usually “wind tunnels” with plenty of high CFM 120mm fans fitted and designed to torture your ears.

Because of its mammoth size, the V1110 has plenty of space for six rubber dampened hard disk drives, E-ATX motherboards and even the longest of power supplies. An enormous removable motherboard tray makes building systems into the case a snap, and the included dual 120mm cooling fans can be speed controlled from outside the case. What's more, they're extremely quiet when set to low.

All in all, it’s a fantastically high quality chassis that just oozes class and sophistication. If the Cooler Master ATCS 840 isn't to your liking than this is a fantastic alternative.