What Hardware Should I Buy? - Dec 2008

High End Hardware

With a bigger budget you’ll see a big step up in quality and performance, especially as it allows us to include higher quality cooling components like a premium case and a premium after market CPU cooler.

A bit more cash also buys a whole lot more processor, graphics card and hard drive space than our recommendations in the affordable system. What's more, you can pick up some truly excellent hardware that should be more than enough to take on even the most demanding of games for a good while to come if you're willing to spend that little bit more.

The only new addition to our high end hardware recommendations this month is Gigabyte's GA-EP45-UD3R P45 motherboard, which is the ideal overclocking partner for the Q6600 processor.

However, the big change here isn't the hardware itself, but the rising cost of specific components, especially processors, in the last month. Despite the choice of a cheaper motherboard and reduced OS pricing, increased prices have pushed the total cost of our high end machine to over £880 even despite the VAT cut. Conversely, on the other side of the Atlantic building the exact same machine has gotten $300 dollars cheaper!

Graphics Card

First Choice: Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
UK Pricing: £206.94 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $313.99 (ex. Tax)

It seems we've been gushing over the Radeon HD 4870 all summer after it arrived delivering fantastic performance at a very reasonable price point. Now AMD has released a 1GB version of the card and it deliversreal performance improvements in some titles for only a little extra cash over the 512MB version of the card.

In fact, in recent games the performance difference between the 512MB and 1GB versions of the HD 4870 has become even more noticeable and this is only going to become more and more apparent as time goes on and games get more demanding. For such a small amount of extra outlay, you're buying a whole lot more future proofing in our opinion.

Unlike with the Radeon HD 4850, the dual slot cooler on the HD 4870 is more than enough to keep the card cool and availability of custom cooled cards is still pretty patchy. Because of this, we feel you’re better off looking for cheaper stock versions of the card, and in the UK, Powercolor has the cheapest offering right now at just over £200. It's another victim of increasing prices unfortunately, but still cracking value, especially as it's only ten percent more expensive than the cheapest 4870 512MB - well worth it in our opinion.

CPU

First Choice: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 stepping
UK Pricing: £146.80 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $189.99 (ex. Tax)

Intel’s seminal Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad-core processor was all we were ever going to consider for our recommended high-end processor and even after the release of Core i7, it is still the processor that we would buy for our own systems.

While the spec sheet is fairly impressive: a quad-core processor running at 2.4GHz with 8MB of cache, the chip’s overclocking headroom is legendary. By following our handy guide, you should comfortably hit clock speeds of 3.0GHz even if you’re using an Intel stock heatsink, without posing any stability or processor lifespan problems whatsoever.

Sadly, recent price rises have pushed the price above £150 again, but for a 3.0GHz quad-core this is still a great bargain, and while Intel has released 45nm Yorkfield quad-core processors since, none can match the value offered by this inexpensive performance behemoth.

Motherboard

First Choice: Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R
UK Price (as reviewed): £100.80 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $108.99 (ex. Tax)

Recently we reviewed the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R and were certainly pleased enough to recommend it. When properly tweaked it performs great and while it may lack features like ATI CrossFire and dual Ethernet, it has lots of upgradability - plenty of SATA, great audio, decent overclocking and a really intuitive, full featured BIOS. For under £100 it's a good value and a great backbone to pair with our choices above.

If you fancy taking on the pros, Gigabyte is currently running a competition for it's new range of Ultra Durable motherboards that includes the EP45-UD3R as well.