PC Hardware Buyer's Guide March 2011

Premium Player March 2011

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 comfy leather chair with footrest (or sub as it's also known), and you're looking for some kick-ass performance, then this is what we consider the very best hardware at the moment.

New This Month

Of course, we were in the same tough old boat this month as we were last month, when we were umming and ahhing between an X58 or P67 based system for out Premium Player rig. In the end, as you can see, we’ve decided to plump for an X58-based system. This is because we try to make this a guide to what’s best right now and, even though P67 boards are filtering back into the country, we can’t be certain that they offer the same blistering level of performance until we’ve tested them properly.

As a result, we’re hedging our bets by recommending an X58 based system that we know will be quick - LGA1366 processors never stopped being fast, after all. They also have the bonus of offering triple-channel memory support and native dual 16x PCI-E lanes as well.

We also had a decision to make regarding whether or not to include AMD’s imperious new graphics card, the Radeon HD 6990. The card is a complete beast that beats the incumbent Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB by a fair margin in nearly all of our test games. However, it's debatable how much value this offers, as the GTX 580 can still play most games comfortably on a 30in screen, so you arguably don’t need all this graphical horsepower. Even in our Premium Player rig, value for money is still a factor. In fact we’d only recommend considering the HD 6990 if you’re planning to run a triple screen setup, as this is the only situation in which you’re likely to need more firepower than the GTX 580 can conceivably provide.

And The Rest

Forming the base for the Premium Player build is the Asus Sabertooth motherboard, which proved to be hugely overclockable during our testing. It’s muscled out the Asus P6X58D-E and the Gigabyte X58A-UD3R that used to occupy this spot, as it's priced very closely to the two other boards but offers extra features such as an extended warranty, military-class components and an interesting colour scheme.

The CPU that we’ve strapped into the Sabertooth is the trusty Core i7-950. This CPU used to retail for a whopping £400, but its price has plummeted to make it more competitive with Intel’s LGA1155 chips. This is good news, though, as you’re still getting the same great performance, just for half the price. The Core i7-950 is quick at its stock speed of 3.06GHz, but if you’re looking for a little more oomph then you should be able to comfortably ramp up the CPU speed to just north of 4GHz. We got our test sample up to 4.3GHz, but remember that your mileage may vary when overclocking.

If, however, you’re likely to be using the system for running a lot of heavily multithreaded applications, then you should seriously look at upgrading the i7-950 to a Core i7-980x. Granted, this CPU retails for a wallet-melting £750, but its six Hyper-Threaded cores mean it can’t be beaten in multi threaded applications, even by an LGA1155 system.

Meanwhile, graphical finery is handled by the immensely capable Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 1.5GB. This is still the fastest single-GPU card out there, and it's more than capable of playing most modern games on even a 30in screen. It also runs relatively quietly, even when heavily loaded, due to its excellent vapour-chamber-based cooler, meaning your PC should at least stand a chance of sounding, as well as performing, like a ninja.

All this lovely expensive kit 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 its excellent Air Penetrator fans, and its quirky rotated motherboard tray; a feature which is sure to make your killer PC a talking point.

We've recommended the black version of the case, as this is available worldwide. However, if you’d like to get a hold of the limited edition version of the case with the red interior that we reviewed, then look out for the R-W suffix in the listing.

When it comes to LGA1366, we recommend installing 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 healthier 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’ve hooked both of these up to a HighPoint Rocket 620 which allows blistering SATA 6Gbps speeds. You can 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 motherboard's Realtek audio codec and enhance the sound generally. If you're really into your audio, though, it's worth considering replacing the Asus Xonar DX with the Asus Xonar Xense Audio Bundle, which is now on sale for under £200.

On the PSU side, our sister mag Custom PC recommends the 750W XFX Black Edition P1-750B-NLG9, which won its Premium Grade award 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.'

Meanwhile, the CPU cooler we’ve chosen is the Thermaltake Frio, which blasted through our thermal benchmarks. With both its fans installed, it's one of the best coolers we’ve ever seen. The build is then rounded off with a cheap SATA DVD burner.

Finally, 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 will be fine, but serial upgraders need the pricier retail version.