What Hardware Should I Buy? - Oct 2008

£1500 – Premium Hardware

When you’ve got £1,500 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 best top hardware in each component class.

Graphics Card:

First Choice: Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2
UK Pricing: £348.49 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $529.90 (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 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.

Alternative: Nvidia GeForce GTX 280
UK Pricing: £275.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $414.99 (ex. Tax)

The Nvidia GeForce GTX 280 has had a rough time since its launch, thanks to Nvidia massively underestimating the challenge coming from AMD's RV770 GPU. This caused the GT200 family of cards to be over priced by around £100 at launch. Now that prices have been slashed and while the demand for pre-overclocked cards has pushed those prices back up, stock GeForce GTX 280s can be had for less than £300, with this Gigabyte GeForce GTX 280 being the cheapest we’ve found in the UK at just £276. Like the GeForce GTX 260s though, the prices bob about like a buoy in a typhoon.

Its performance is only a little less than the HD 4870 X2 in most circumstances and it’s still the fastest single GPU card on the market, which means less dependence on driver profiles for performance.

CPU

First Choice: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
UK Pricing: £223.42 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $311.37 (ex. Tax)

The Core 2 Quad Q9550 runs up at 2.83GHz and features a full 12MB of L2 cache. What it doesn't feature though is the insane pricing attached to Intel's faster CPUs like the QX9770. We use this CPU in the labs all the time for motherboard testing and it's consistently proven itself to be a great performer in both general use and overclocking - on a good motherboard we've hit close to 4GHz with just air cooling, a far better overclock than the older, 65nm Q6600 G0 can manage.

If you've got the cash to drop an extra £100 on your processor over the Q6600, the latest 45nm Yorkfield core is well worth investing in, but if you're in no hurry to upgrade just yet - you might want to wait a couple of months for the Core i7 920 CPU that should ship for around the same price. That is, if Internet rumours are to be believed.

Motherboard

First Choice: Asus Maximus II Formula
UK Pricing: £141.59 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $186.00 (ex. Tax)

We’ve only just recently reviewed this motherboard and it’s a simply fantastic system platform for many enthusiasts while not being too expensive either. With a brilliant array of high-end and overclocking features presented without an intimidating BIOS like some DFI boards, the Maximus II Formula is a fantastically accessible premium motherboard.

Of course, if you do love your DFI motherboards then the LANParty X48 LT T2R will be a no brainer for you, because both are about the same price.

However, the Maximus II Formula does have some shortcomings, most notably that both the PCI-Express 2.0 lanes are only x8 not the full x16, restricting bandwidth a little, but we decided that the excellent board design and oodles of features, combined with the general awesomeness in style more than make up for it.

Alternatively: XFX nForce 780i SLI
UK Pricing: £156.27 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $219.99 (ex. Tax)

If you’d rather go for some SLI action then an Nvidia nForce chipset is really the only way you can go. Currently the best out there still is the Nvidia reference nForce 780i SLI design, sold either by XFX or EVGA. It features three x16 PCI-Express 2.0 slots for 3-way SLI if you've got the power supply and the budget to accommodate that.

You'd probably think we'd recommend the Asus Striker II Formula, but we found that the design was far from perfect and the Nvidia designed 780i SLI boards are far better in our opinion. But what about nForce 790i Ultra SLI? Surely that's the best of the best? In a word, no. It's too expensive and still plagued with problems like hard drive corruption - we wouldn't recommend anyone used this other than for purely benchmarking, and normally we don't build PCs just to test on.