PC Hardware Buyer's Guide - April 2010

Premium Player

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.

While we're keen to point out that while the top-end hardware depreciates in value fairly rapidly, the sound card and SSD should last into future upgrades, so they can certainly be thought of as an investment. If you’ve just bought that 24in or 30in monitor, surround sound speaker kit and nice comfy leather chair with footrest (usually called the sub) 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.

Again, we've found that UK prices have increased this month, while US have dropped slightly - this is mostly because memory and SSD prices in the UK have spiked, while SSD prices have dropped in the US.


The Radeon HD 5870 1GB is still the weapon of choice for our Premium Player, although we're obliged to point out the price has risen again recently, which we suspect is due to the favourable benchmark results and pricing versus Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 and GTX 470 cards. In the UK the GTX 470 is £310, but offers less performance than a HD 5870, but things are a bit better for Nvidia in the US where the GTX 470 has a slightly keener price.

While the GTX 470 is a card to avoid at the moment, the GTX 480 has some slight merit - it does handle AA better than a HD 5870 in some games, for example. However, it's also incredibly hot, loud and consumes loads of power - that it costs £125 more than a HD 5870 is the final nail in its coffin. We should also point out that if you really want to push the boat out, the dual-GPU Radeon HD 5970 is a fantastic performer, but is a rare find in e-tailer warehouses even if you can afford to drop nearly £600 on a graphics card.


We've opted for the great value Core i7-930 although we'd drop in the Core i7-980X if we wanted to thrash through heavily multi-threaded tasks and had £800 to spend on a CPU. However, an i7-930 will still get those video encodes done pretty quickly and we won't have to go without pudding for a month to afford it, either.

Combined it with our continual favourite, the Asus P6TD Deluxe, we'd aim to run the i7-930 at 4GHz at least. Couple either CPU with the excellent Titan Fenrir cooler, and you might even be able to settle for 4.3GHz without the temperatures getting too toasty.

Included is 6GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory, which we feel is enough for most people. If you seriously feel the need for more space to stretch your digital wares into, then the motherboard has six DIMMs for up to 24GB of DDR3 memory, but with memory prices rapidly increasing you might want to either buy now or be prepared to hold off for quite a while. Unless you have to opt for a 3GB kit, you'll want to use a 64-bit OS so that you can use all that memory - if you're not a perennial upgrader, an OEM copy should be fine but regular upgraders will need the pricier retail version.


As usual, we include the beautiful, yet largely inexpensive Cooler Master ATCS 840, but if you want something a little... blacker, then there's the Corsair Obsidian for around £210, various Lian Li cases (the £300 Tyr X1000 springs to mind), the Antec Twelve Hundred and the SilverStone Fortress FT02 to consider.

Power is now provided by the Seasonic X-750. It's silent most of the time, and extremely quiet when the fan does finally spin up. A 750W PSU might not be enough for multi-GPU setup, or the addition of dozens of extra parts, but it will certainly be enough for this build and a good few general upgrades in the future. Look at the Enermax Revolution 85+ for more powerful PSUs: the 950W and 1050W units are very capable, for example.

On the SSD front, we've had a large price hike this month in the UK, with a surprising drop in the US for identical products. SSDs are still very expensive - no thanks to ever fluctuating NAND prices - but they also bring great benefits and this build really deserves one. We've tested the most popular SSDs on Windows 7, including how efficient their TRIM and Garbage collection functions work and we can now recommend Indilinx-powered drives with full confidence as the best value for great performance. The Corsair Nova is slightly cheaper than the OCZ Vertex and if anything slightly faster overall too, so that's our recommendation.


Combine the SSD with a Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB (or a Seagate 7200.12 or Western Digital Black, if you can't find an F3) for some mass storage, and you've got a great setup.

Finally we've also included a sound card - the Asus Xonar DX. It offers better quality than on-board sound and supports more surround-sound standards.