What Hardware Should I Buy? - Dec 2008

Premium Hardware

When you’ve got £1,500 or more to throw at your PC, you're out to buy premium hardware that gives the best of best performance. Without going super-crazy and losing our heads, we've really gone to town to maximise this setup because no matter how much you're spending, getting it right is a must.

Be wary before you unleash the credit card though and really consider if you’re really going to get the most out of this kit. The PC hardware market is one of diminishing returns – the more money you spend, the smaller the improvements between hardware options becomes, and the poorer the value you get as a result.

However, if you’ve just bought that 24" or 30" monitor, surround sound speaker kit and nice comfy leather chair with foot rest (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 in each component class.

Last month saw a ton of changes here with the launch of the Intel Core i7 range of processors, although pricing had yet to be confirmed for a lot of these products. Now the supply to retailers has started to stabilise, we've finally got accurate pricing, and it seems that the Core i7 920 is still very much the sweet spot here.

Graphics Card

First Choice: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2
UK Pricing: £391.48 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $489.99 (ex. Tax)

As if the single RV770 core of the Radeon HD 4870 wasn’t enough, AMD went and strapped two cores to one board and produced the most insanely powerful card currently available. Packing a ludicrous 1,600 stream processors and memory bandwidth of 230GB/sec, the card sits atop almost every single one of our graphics benchmarks by a typical margin of at least ten percent over the next best performer, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280.

However, all the bumps still haven’t quite been rolled out of CrossFire just yet, and the card fails to scale properly in some games, with World in Conflict being the prime example. In these circumstances, the 4870 X2 performs just a little ahead of a standard HD 4870, making that big investment on your GPU almost pointless.

We’re not saying that this is a regular occurrence, in fact World in Conflict is the only game we’ve seen the 4870 X2 not completely decimate the competition, but it’s something to consider if you play a lot of older or less well known games where the driver profiles won’t be set up to allow the full power of the 4870 X2 to be used.

In the majority of circumstances though, the 4870 X2 is the honey monster in the world of graphics cards, and nothing else delivers frame rates to match it in more popular games like Crysis, GRID, Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Call of Duty 4.

CPU

First Choice: Intel Core i7 920
UK Pricing: £233.17 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $294.99 (ex. Tax)

The Core i7 920 is now available and it seems to be stocked fairly well at the moment. Intel's Core i7 might not excel in absolutely everything but it's the firm choice for future proofing. We're currently running this at 4GHz in the labs here at bit-tech completely stable and over 4.2GHz on air isn't unheard of. That's some serious overhead to dive into, and while this needs a beefy cooler to cope, the same could certainly be said for an overclocked Q6600.

Motherboard

First Choice: Asus P6T Deluxe
UK Pricing: £228.91 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $295.00 (ex. Tax)

While the MSI X58 Deluxe gives you more features out the box, we have to admit that having had more time with Asus P6T Deluxe, we'd recommend it over the MSI board due to its more stable BIOS, although having had 4-4.2GHz on both of these boards with the above CPU, and with the excellent features you get in the box they are both ultimate buys. The MSI also offers support for three-way SLI, unlike the Asus P6T, however we're recommending the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 here and both have at least two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots for quad CrossFire should you want to go all out graphics crazy.

We'll have a full review in the next few days so long as Rich doesn't blow any more X58 motherboards up, and while certainly not cheap - probably the most we've ever considered paying for a motherboard - given our playful experiences so far we're very impressed.

Memory

First Choice: G.Skill 6GB Triple Channel Memory Kit - PC3-12800 (1600MHz)
UK Pricing: £216.25 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $229.99 (ex Tax)

With a Core i7 920 at 4GHz you'll need some memory to complement it; 1,600MHz parts are perfect and should provide a mammoth memory bandwidth. These G.Skill DIMMs are a very low 1.5-1.6V making them easily within Core i7 safe specifications, although they don't have Intel XMP but, more importantly, they do feature a lifetime warranty. The triple-channel kit means they are matched and qualified to work with Core i7 CPUs and, while 9-9-9-24 isn't hugely fast, the mammoth bandwidth should certainly make up for this.

We did want to recommend the more expensive but slightly lower latency 8-8-8-24 OCZ Gold Z3 kit £247.24, but the voltage is also a fraction higher and it also doesn't feature Intel XMP. However, we're expecting more triple-channel DDR3 kits to arrive throughout this month, so be sure to keep an eye out and an ear to the ground for good deals.