PC Hardware Buyer's Guide - March 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. We've really gone to town to maximise this machine but 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.

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.


The Radeon HD 5870 1GB is an obvious pick for the Premium Player, although we are obliged to point out there will be some form of competition at this level from Nvidia later this month. How fast and at what cost, we don't know though.


Considering the eye-watering cost of the Core i7-975, we've opted for the great value Core i7-930 and combined it with our continual favourite Asus P6TD Deluxe. Both of which will require you to draw just £450 from the bank, which is a relatively small proportion of this premium build. Be mindful though - 6-core Intel Gulftown is due soon, but rather than wait, with a BIOS update this motherboard also supports Intel's forthcoming Gulftown 6-core CPUs as well for a direct upgrade path.

Couple the CPU with the excellent Titan Fenrir cooler, and you'll easily see 4 to 4.3GHz from this combination.

Included is 6GB of 1,600MHz DDR3 memory, which we feel is enough for most people, but if you seriously feel the need for more space to stretch your digital wares into, then the motherboard supports six DIMMs for 12-24GB of DDR3 memory. Bearing in mind the latest Kingston 24GB kit will demand in excess of £900 from your wallet though.


As usual we include it all in the beautiful, yet largely inexpensive Cooler Master ATCS 840, however if you want something a little.. blacker, then there's the Corsair Obsidian for around £210, various Lian Li cases - like the £300 Tyr X1000 - the Antec Twelve Hundred and the SilverStone Fortress FT02 for example.

Power is now provided by the Seasonic X-750 since the M12D is end of life and unavailable in many places. It's silent most of the time, and extremely quiet when the fan does finally spin up. 750W might not be enough for multi-GPU or the addition of dozens of extra parts, but it will certainly be enough for this build and general upgrades, including a 6-core. Look at the Enermax Revolution 85+ for more powerful PSUs: the 950W and 1050W are very capable.

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 recently tested the most popular SSDs on Windows 7, including how efficient their TRIM and Garbage collection functions work and we can now recommend either the slightly cheaper Crucial M225 128GB or OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD Indilinx drives or slightly larger Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD which also costs more. Be mindful that the Intel and Indilinx SSDs several months old now and new SSDs such as the Sandforce and Marvell based ones will be released in the near future, offering SATA 6Gbps and improved performance, however, at what cost we're yet unsure.


Combine either of these drives with the Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB, or alternative Seagate 7200.12 or Western Digital Black for some mass storage and these make a great combination.

Finally we've also included a discrete sound card - the Asus Xonar DX. It offers a better quality than on-board sound with more features, and finally uses one of 1x PCI-Express slots that rarely get used.