What Hardware Should I Buy? - Oct 2008

£800 – High End

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 an after market CPU cooler.

£800 also buys a whole lot more processor, graphics card and memory than the PC we've just specced up for just £450. With this budget, you can get yourself some really excellent hardware that should be more than enough to take on even the most demanding of games for a good while to come.

Graphics Card

First Choice: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 4870
UK Pricing: £179.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $267.95 (ex. Tax)

At around £180, the Radeon HD 4870 offers fantastic performance at even the highest of resolutions and particularly shines when anti-aliasing is enabled. With 4xAA turned on, frame rates will drop by typically just twenty percent but the image quality improvement is fantastic. When we tested with the very recent Catalyst 8.8 drivers from ATI, performance has further improved above our initial benchmarks and the Radeon HD 4870 can now give the Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 a run for its money in many scenarios, despite weighing in at around £100 cheaper than team green’s flagship GPU.

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 Sapphire’s bundle offers the best compromise between cost and kit. While the bundle is pretty limited, you still get a two year warranty from ATI’s biggest board partner, and for £180 we (and many of you) can't argue with the card's excellent value for money.

Alternatively: Nvidia GeForce GTX 260
UK Pricing: £169.20 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $249.99 (ex. Tax)

Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 260 is something of a weird second place in the current generation, being outperformed by the HD 4870 in many situations, although at common desktop resolutions like 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,680 x 1,050, the Nvidia card is much more competitive. We'd say this card is more fairly targeted at those running either 1,680 x 1,050 or 1,920 x 1,200 displays though, so it's competitive at the bottom end of the target market.

At low anti-aliasing settings it frequently bests or matches the Radeon HD 4870, before losing out at higher resolutions and anti-aliasing levels. While we’d take the Radeon HD 4870 every time for its superior AA performance, if you’re looking to save £10-20 (surprising when originally it was £50 more expensive), a GeForce GTX 260 is still an excellent buy.

Be sure to keep your eyes open for special offers on them, as they can be had for as low as £160 but the price continually jumps about like a yo-yo. At that price though they're competing with pre-overclocked HD 4850s, which the GeForce GTX 260 is unquestionably superior to.

CPU

First Choice: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 stepping
UK Pricing: £124.94 (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 despite being over a year since its launch, 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, and 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.

Alternative: AMD Phenom 9850 X4 Black Edition
UK Pricing: £119.81 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $169.00 (ex. Tax)

or Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
UK Pricing: £112.95 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $169.99 (ex. Tax)

While it’s easy to gush over Intel’s quad-core processor, if you want pure MHz rather than more cores you may never use then the E8400 is not only cheaper, but it should also easily hit 4GHz when overclocked. Manufactured using the newer 45nm process, it also operates at lower temperatures and if you're really into overclocking the front side bus and memory then this is exactly the CPU to go for without over spending.

However, not everyone wants an Intel rig though and the AMD alternative is currently the unlocked quad-core Phenom X4 9850 Black Edition. It may not be able to match the Core 2 Quad Q6600 for performance or overclockability, but it is still a decent option for AMD stalwarts, offering four 2.5GHz cores and 2MB of L2 cache and 2MB of shared L3 cache. The price is right too at around £120, but given the choice we’d take the Q6600 or E8400 in almost every scenario.

Motherboard

First Choice: Asus P5Q-E
UK Pricing: £102.98 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $154.99 (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 currently just a bit out of our price range for this system.

The P5Q-E is closely specced to the Deluxe, and although it's a little leaner on the features it still has the Asus EPU 6-engine for power efficiency, Drive Xpert, ExpressGate, CrossFireX support and some decent 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.

Alternative: Asus M3A79-T
UK Pricing: £127.38 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $188.99 (ex. Tax)

While a bit more expensive that we'd like, the new southbridge offering advanced overclocking features for the Black Edition Phenom X4 processors is worth it. In addition there are more SATA ports and the 790FX is AMD's premium chipset offering a pair of full PCI-Express 2.0 x16 lanes for CrossFire. We could save some cash and grab a 790GX for £25 less, but having used the original Asus M3A32-MVP extensively that uses the 790FX with the older SB600 southbridge, and listening to quite a bit of positive feedback about this board we think it's worth stretching for the M3A79-T if you can. Keep an eye out for a bit-tech review soon!