What Hardware Should I Buy? - Nov 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 recommended affordable hardware. 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.

We've made one or two changes in our recommended high end hardware this month, with the standard Radeon HD 4870 512MB replaced with the 1GB variant and the excellent Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 650W moving up to our first choice following the positive feedback we continue to receive about it. However, the core hardware is still unchanged, with Intel's Q6600 G0 still the processor of choice, despite the release of Core i7. Right now we feel Intel's new line of processors and X58 motherboards are just too expensive to consider at this pricing level.

Graphics Card

First Choice: Powercolor ATI Radeon HD 4870 1GB
UK Pricing: £205.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $299.99 (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 delivers very noticeable 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: £129.95 (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.

Less than £125 for a 3.0GHz quad-core is frankly an absolute 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: Asus P5Q-E
UK Pricing: £107.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $146.99 (ex. Tax)

When we first looked at the Asus P5Q Deluxe we really liked its many, many features, overclocking capabilities and the overall quality of product. The problem is, the Deluxe is just a bit too pricey, and has a some some features that most of can live without.

The P5Q-E is closely specced to the Deluxe, and although it's a little leaner on the features it still has the same Asus EPU 6-engine for power efficiency, Drive Xpert, ExpressGate, CrossFireX support and some decent chipset cooling too. For a shade over £100 this is a great value Intel P45 motherboard which provides an excellent base for a well featured performance PC. What's more, its very intuitive BIOS should facilitate easy overclocking too. If you're not overly in favour of Asus boards, something like the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R or DS4 would be a solid alternative.

The P45 is currently the most popular choice - the Intel chipsets are usually held in better regard than the Nvidia ones and generally the P45 is a more worthwhile purchase over the P35, while still being largely cheaper than X48. With regards to multi-GPU, we have to simply say forget it! If you have spare cash to part with, go for a faster single card instead of two mediocre ones - not only will this free up your motherboard choice, it'll also guarantee the support and performance in more games too.