PC Hardware Buyer's Guide October 2010

Gaming Workhorse October 2010

While our Enthusiast Overclocker system is built around getting maximum performance on a reasonable budget, you’ll have to step up the hardware scale to get excellent all-round performance. With about a grand to spend you can build yourself an enviable PC that can take heavy gaming at 1,920 x 1,080, and is capable of processing a heap of RAW images or encoding video or audio pretty quickly.

New This Month

Unfortunately, there’s very little to report with the Gaming Workhorse this month, as we’ve not seen anything that can oust any of the components in the build. What we do have to report is a bunch of UK price hikes which have pushed the price of the build up by a not insubstantial £25. The prime reason for this has been the Silverstone Raven RV02 case, which has gone up by just over a tenner. This isn’t great news, but we’re sticking by the case currently due to the excellent cooling it offers and its unique design features.

Our PSU of choice also jumped up in price by a tenner. We haven’t changed our recommendation on which one to buy though, as the Antec TruePower New 650W gives out rock solid power on all its rails.

And The Rest

We’ve stuck with the HD 5870 we slotted into this build last month, but if you want to spend significantly less than £1,000, a heavily overclocked 1GB GeForce GTX 460 would do you proud. The card will deliver great gaming performance at 1,680 x 1,050 and merely very good performance at 1,920 x 1,200 which is a bargain for £190.

No matter what size of screen you have, the GeForce GTX 465 isn't a good option, however - it may sound faster than the GTX 460, and cost more (£200) but it's actually slower. Don't be tempted by this turkey of a GPU.

If you're into your gaming audio, then the Asus Xonar Xense card-and-headset bundle might be of interest for this system. It's finally on sale, and for less than £200, making it well worth a look if you're serious about audio.

Similarly, if you've got over £1,000 to spend, you might opt for a cheap SSD to add as a games drive - see our SSD Buyer's Guide for our recommendations. Or just head to the 64GB Crucial C300 review instead.


The AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition makes more of a claim for consideration in this PC than the Enthusiast Overclocker as it did perform well in heavily multi-threaded tasks such as video encoding and 3D rendering - i.e. the 'workhorse' part of this machine. At stock speeds, we saw a score of 1,992 in our video encoding test, which was much faster than the 1,224 of the Core i7-860, while Cinebench 10 returned a score of 18,671 on the X6 1090T BE and of only 17,032 on the i7-860. While the i7-860 was still outperformed by the X6 1090T BE in the video encoding test when both were overclocked (1,565 compared to 2,391) the i7-860 scored 23,749 points in Cinebench 10 rather than 22,073.


We’ve still chosen the i7-860 for this PC, as it scored 1,621 overall in our Media Benchmarks rather than the 1,367 of the X6 1090T BE. We can also pair the i7-860 with the excellent Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 motherboard while the X6 1090T BE works best in a motherboard with an AMD 8-series chipset – the best value board we’ve seen to date is the £120 Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB 3, meaning that the X6 1090T BE option costs £40 more than the i7-860 and is less versatile.

As we wanted to keep the budget under £1,000, we couldn’t stretch to a ‘proper’ Core i7 system alas. With an Intel Core i7-930 still costing £210, a decent motherboard £150, and 6GB of memory now costing £45 more than 4GB we’d have been spending another £150. Even opting for a £193 Core i7-920 would have left us with a significant overspend.

Still, we’d have a brilliant system for that little bit of extra outlay, so if you’re happy to spend nearer £1,000, you have our blessing.

As previously stated, we like having 4GB of memory in our PCs, and we’ve chosen 1,600MHz DDR3 to give us a bit of headroom for overclocking the CPU. For example, if we wanted to aim for a 4GHz overclock we’d use a Base Clock 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 Base Clock, which would give us a memory frequency of 1,146MHz, which is a bit 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.

The CPU cooler we’ve chosen is the Thermaltake Frio which blasted through our thermal benchmarks. With both its fans installed its one of the best cooler we’ve ever seen.

We’ve also listed the brilliant Antec TruePower New 650W PSU, a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard disk and a cheap SATA DVD drive. We’ve also added an Asus Xonar DS sound card to avoid conflicts with the Realtek audio codec of the motherboard and enhances the sound generally.

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.