What Hardware Should I Buy? - April 2009

What Hardware Should I Buy? - April 2009

It’s all change for our buyer’s guide this month, with a full redesign and reassessment of our hardware recommendations to better suit a wider range of requirements and budgets. We’ve now put together four different systems from the highest quality products to suit not only different budgets, but also different needs.

We appreciate that while there are those of you out there happy to have a tinker in the BIOS and overclock your system, there are just as many looking for high performance without having to worry about having to overclock.

As many of our recommendations in the past have been based on the performance that can be achieved rather than what you’re guaranteed from a component’s stock performance, we’ve tweaked a few of our recommendations to better reflect a balance between the two: overclocking is of course still important in adding essential extra value, but isn't the end all answer, because performance inevitably varies from build to build.

We’ve also reassessed a few products following recent price changes. It seems that once a particular component has been handed a steady supply of positive reviews, prices inexplicably rise due to increased demand, and often refuse to fall even if the competition slash their own.


While our guide and our selections are changing due to different needs and price cuts, March has been fairly quiet as far as new consumer launches has been. We’d hoped CeBIT would be the perfect showcase for manufacturers to demonstrate their latest wares, but many chose to stay away and it now looks like most will be waiting until Computex in June before unveiling the fanciest bits of kit for us to lust after.

April will bring a few new major products though: two of the most important to us gamers will be ATI’s Radeon HD 4890 and Nvidia’s competing GeForce GTX 275 graphics cards, with both of which arrived on the 2nd of this month.

As always, all recommendations made in the guide are based entirely on either our personal experiences with hardware or our own reviews (both those of bit-tech and CustomPC) and occasionally positive feedback and suggestions we receive from our ever growing community. With such a huge amount of experience and product knowledge behind our recommendations, you can rest assured any product listed will be a quality choice, but not the absolute and only answer, as our readers will clearly have their own personal preferences.

We take our buyer's guide seriously here at bit-tech, and will continue to update it on a monthly basis, with up-to-date pricing and revised selections – a necessity when you factor in the ever fluctuating prices that make the enthusiast hardware market so volatile. However, do bear in mind that prices are fluid and while we do our best to find the very best deals on individual components at the start of every month, prices and availability can change at any time.

Even with the major redesign this month we’re still planning on expanding the guide and will continue to include additional ranges of recommended hardware as time goes on - we've already introduced a quarterly Home Theatre PC buyer's guide in response to a growing number of requests, and spent a lot of the last month looking at mini-ITX hardware is response to continued interest. The feedback you provide in the forums every month is invaluable, so don't forget to let us know what you think again this month!