What Hardware Should I Buy? - August 2009

Gaming Workhorse

While our enthusiast system is built around maximising overclocking and gaming potential on a budget, those looking to maximise gaming performance and do a tonne of multi-tasking will absolutely find it necessary to pick up a quad core CPU, which is what we’ve built our gaming workhorse system around.

This month we've dropped LGA775 altogether in favour of the Core i7 920. With recent price drops for X58 boards, again, we can finally build a price competitive platform to a similarly powerful LGA775 one.

The benefit of the Core i7 920 is obvious: native quad core with HyperThreading, oodles of memory bandwidth and a larger 6GB memory footprint from a triple channel setup. The 920 will also hit 4GHz on the board we've chosen, and when bundled with the 1,600MHz memory will afford tonnes of performance - it'll certainly live through the impending Lynnfield launch.

The small MSI X58M has plenty of features: several SATA, eSATA, Firewire and High-Definition audio as usual, as well as support for both CrossFire and SLI. However because of its microATX size, multi-GPU is squeezed in, so dual height cards will need some extra airflow.


We've bundled a single GeForce GTX 275 though because it affords an excellent price-to-performance for gamers with 1,680 x 1,050 or 1,920 x 1,200 screens. Alternatively you could get the Radeon HD 4890 1GB, but its stock cooler isn't as good as it could be, meaning it's hot and noisy in comparison to the GTX 275, and 4890s with third party coolers are often prohibitively expensive. Whichever you choose, both will deliver fantastic gaming performance.

MSI X58M: UK | US
Core i7 920 (D0): UK | US
Nvidia GeForce GTX 275: UK | US
6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800 CL7/8: UK | US

This system also offers much better stock (not to mention overclocked) performance than our enthusiast system for those who multi-task or video encode (for example), but of course this increase in performance and functionality out of the box means a noticeably higher price tag.

We've chosen to bundle this build in the Lian Li Armoursuit PC-P50 this month for a change. Mostly because we wanted a change from exclusively suggesting only high airflow cases, and the Lian Li is a cleaner looking design with great features, that's also very easy to use. If you don't like the Lian Li, there's always the HAF 932, Antec P183 or Akasa Omega in the UK for those who want a variety of excellent case options to choose from between the £100 to £130 mark.

To power it all, we've bundled the usual and ever excellent Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W PSU which offers plenty of power for even a Core i7 build. In the States, you can't buy Be Quiet! so we changed it for the equally good Corsair TX650W PSU instead; however, it's worth remembering that it's not modular, so be prepared for some cable mess.

Lian Li Armoursuit PC-P50: UK | US
be quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W PSU: UK
Corsair TX650W PSU: US

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 might not be "as fast" as the latest Seagate 7200.12 or Western Digital Black 1TB hard drives, but in the real world the difference is negligible at best.

We've wanted to bundle in a cheap 60/64GB SSD in this month's build because we feel the much greater responsiveness is certainly worth the investment, but we're still deciding between the Kingston V-series based on the JMicron/Toshiba chipset with 64k of cache, OCZ's Indilinx based Agility series, the Samsung M64 and Corsair's M-series SSDs too. If you've got an opinion either way - let us know!

LG GH22NS50 22x DVD-RW SATA Black: UK | US
Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk: UK | US