PC Hardware Buyer's Guide July 2010

Premium Player July 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

Our wish-list PC hasn't been affected by the GeForce GTX 460 launch, but there are a few cards that were worth considering when we were putting this PC together. We've seen two drool-worthy graphics cards in the last month or so, with the awesome Sapphire Radeon HD 5970 4GB Toxic a stunning piece of engineering. Not only does the dual-GPU monster sport a large overclock, but Sapphire has made it quiet and cool-running by using a giant, triple-slot cooler. Alas, the card costs nearly £1,000, but if we had that kind of disposable income, we'd place an order this instant.

The other, slightly less exuberant challenger for the 16x PCI-E slot of our Premium Player ws Zotac's GeForce GTX 480 Amp! Edition. To keep the overclock GeForce GTX 480 GPU at the heart of the card cool, Zotac also had to choose a triple-slot cooler. However, we had to remove the shroud during testing as it rubbed against one of the fans - apart from that, the card was excellent, with only its near-£500 price tag proving a stumbling block.


We've therefore stuck to recommending a Radeon HD 5870 as the high-end graphics card of choice, although you should also consider a HD 5970 if you want more performance, as well as the two cards we've just discussed. We'd still give a reference GeForce GTX 480 a miss, as it's just too loud, hot and power-hungry to live with, even if it is a touch faster than HD 5870 (especially if you use 4x AA).

We've changed our motherboard recommendation this month, from the Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R to Asus' P6X58D-E. The Gigabyte board has undergone a revision that has thrown up some interesting issues that we're currently working through with Gigabyte, but our sister mag Custom PC has given the Asus board a clean bill of health and recommend it over the Gigabyte at the moment, in light of the issues we're experiencing.


Our sister mag has also recently conducted a PSU test, with the 750W XFX Black Edition P1-750B-NLG9 winning Custom PC's coveted 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.' We've also changed our cooler to the Thermaltake Frio - we'll bring you the review in the next day or so to show you why.

Finally, if you're really into your audio, you might wan to consider replacing the Asus Xonar DX with the Asus Xonar Xense Audio Bundle. It's due to go on sale for £210 rather than the £275 we reviewed it at, which a fair price for a high-end sound card and a high-quality (if not perfect) headset.

And The Rest

The choice of which CPU to opt for is always tricky, especially as AMD 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 just about as overlcockable i7-920 will disappear from our shelves.

While we’d all like to have a i7-980X in our PC, the extra four cores over the i7-930 only help in certain applications – again, heavily multithreaded 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.


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.

We’ve stuck with the Cooler Master ATCS 840 as our premium case, as it’s minimalist looks and reasonable price make it a bargain. However, you could save some cash by opting for a Fractal Design R2, or really splash out on a non-standard case such as the Lian Li Tyr PC-X1000.

For storage, we’ve gone for a single 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard disk and a 120GB SandForce SSD. We recommend either the Corsair F120 or the OCS Vertex 2 120GB as both these drives use the fast SF-1500 firmware and both have a track record in supplying firmware updates and support in a timely fashion. We’d install Windows, games and slow-loading applications to the SSD, and everything else to the Samsung hard disk.

If you haven't got a copy already, you might want to 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.

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. We discuss an alternative above. To round things off, there’s a cheap SATA DVD drive (we’ll save the Blu-ray drive for our Home Theatre PC).