PC Hardware Buyer's Guide September 2010

Enthusiast Overclocker September 2010

The Enthusiast Overclocker is a PC designed for those looking to build a fast PC without splashing out on pricey hardware. If you're not into speedy video encoding and heavy multi-tasking, but still love your high-resolution gaming, we've created a PC with the best balance of performance possible. However, you'll need to apply your overclocking skills to get the most from this system, but then, that's half the fun of a DIY build, isn't it?

New This Month

Well....nothing really. We've not seen anything this month that could muscle out any of the uber overclockable components in this build. We have, however, seen a slew of price cuts which has made this rig even better value for money. A full £5 has dropped off the motherboard, memory, PSU and hard disk, and 1GB GTX 460s can now be found for £170. These changes add up to bring the build under £700 for the first time in a while which is great news. This means there is some extra flexibility in the budget, so in our discussion below we’ve recommended some alternative components you may want to sub in if you’ve got a shade more that £700 to spend.

And The Rest

We've chosen the GTX 460 1GB, as the extra cash for the extra memory and memory bandwidth over the 768MB version is probably going to be worth it in a year or two's time.

If your budget is a little tighter and you want to get the system down to around £650, the GTX 460 768MB is a reasonable choice for around £145. If cash is even tighter, consider opting for a Core i3 CPU if gaming is important, or a HD 5770 if CPU power is more of a priority.

If you want to spend more than £170 on your new graphics card, the GeForce GTX 465 isn't the way to do it - it may sound faster than the GTX 460, and cost more (£180) but it's actually slower. The GTX 460 1GB even has the measure of the £220 HD 5850, so your next graphics card option is the £280 Radeon HD 5870.


As we’ve got a bit more to spend on this system, we can look at some of the really powerful CPUs on the market. Our target price of less than £750 means that LGA1336 is out of the question, so we looked toward LGA1156 and Socket AM3 instead. The AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition isn't worth considering for this PC, so we'll stick with our Core i5-750.


Our confidence comes from the fact that the 3.2GHz X6 1090T BE managed an overall score of 1,367 at stock speed in our Media Benchmarks (boosted to 1,638 when overclocked to 3.87GHz). It's over £200 though, and the £155 Intel Core i5-750 scored 1,474 overall at stock speed and 1,953 when overclocked from 2.66GHz to 4.2GHz.

With the CPU decided on, the motherboard choice was obvious – we’re yet to find a P55 board that offers better value for money than the Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2, which has a clean layout and is very overclockable despite costing only £80.

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 3.6GHz overclock, we’d use a Base Clock of 180MHz (as 180 x 20 = 3,600). 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 1,080MHz, 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 1,440MHz. We wouldn’t recommend overclocking 1,333MHz memory to 1,440MHz for everyday use unless you really know your DRAM.

As we’re planning a fairly heavy overclock, we needed to add a great cooler to the build, and we chose the Gelid Tranquillo for its cooling ability and its quietness. If you wanted to chill your CPU even lower, the slightly more expensive Thermaltake Frio would serve as it provides excellent cooling, though it is a little louder than the Tranquilo.

We’ve been recommending the Xigmatek Utgard for a little while now. The case is capable of cooling an overclocked PC very well, and has bonus additions such as the dual channel fan controller. If however you have a few extra quid to spend then our sister publication Custom PC has recently reviewed the excellent Silverstone Raven RV02. It’s a little more expensive at just over £100 but it’s one of the best cases for air cooling we’ve seen, and we also think it’s pretty good looking. If we’ve piqued your interest then check back later in the week for the full bit-tech review of the Raven RV02.

To the case, we’ve added the 500W OCZ ModXStream PSU, a cheap SATA DVD drive and a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 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.