What Hardware Should I Buy? - Feb 2009

Premium Hardware

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

With Nvidia launching two high end GPUs in January, are the GTX 285 and GTX 295 enough to wrestle the crown of recommended premium GPU away from the Radeon HD 4870 X2?

Graphics Card

First Choice: Powercolor Radeon HD 4870 X2
UK Pricing: £339.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $439.99 (ex. Tax)

Despite assaults on its position from Nvidia's duo of high-end graphics card releases this month - the GeForce GTX 285 and dual GPU GTX 295 - we're still opting for the 4870 X2 as our premium graphics card choice. The dual RV770 GPU monster card is only getting better and better as ATI's CrossFire drivers improve on a monthly basis, with the majority of titles now scaling remarkably well. Its price, while still enough to make most of us baulk at the prospect, has actually come down a little in recent months.

In comparison, the GeForce GTX 285, while avoiding much of the reliance on driver profiles thanks to its use of just a single GPU, and indisputably the fastest such card currently on sale, is just priced too highly right now. We'd hoped for a drop in price from Nvidia for the GTX 285 to really shake things up and fire a shot over ATI's bows, but instead it's just too expensive, with prices starting at around £300. When you consider the 4870 X2 outperforms it in almost every scenario, and by quite some margin, it's not so attractive.

The GTX 295 also suffers from being priced just too darn high. Despite whooping the 4870 X2 in most graphics benchmarks, prices start at £400 - a good £60 more than you can pick up a 4870 X2 for, and a hard extra expense to stomach in this price range. While the extra advantages of Nvidia's graphics cards like PhysX and CUDA are enough to sway the high end choice in its favour, here the choices just aren't good enough for us to look beyond the 4870 X2 for the time being, although a price cut from either the GTX 285 or GTX 295 could change things.

CPU

First Choice: Intel Core i7 920
UK Pricing: £243.98 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $302.99 (ex. Tax)

The Core i7 920 is now well stocked everywhere, but prices have jumped a great deal this month by up to £40. Intel's Core i7 might not excel in absolutely everything but it's the firm choice for future proofing. We're currently running this at 4GHz completely stable in the labs here at bit-tech and over 4.2GHz on air isn't unheard of. That's some serious overhead to dive into, and while this needs a beefy cooler to cope, the same could certainly be said for an overclocked Q6600.

Motherboard

First Choice: Asus P6T Deluxe
UK Pricing: £233.77 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $299.99 (ex. Tax)

While the MSI Eclipse SLI gives you more features out of the box, we have to admit that having had more success with the Asus P6T Deluxe, we'd recommend it over the MSI board due to its more stable BIOS. However, having had 4-4.2GHz on both of these boards with the above CPU, and with the excellent features you get in the box they are both ultimate buys. The MSI also offers support for three-way SLI, unlike the Asus P6T, however we're recommending the ATI Radeon 4870 X2 here and both have at least two PCI-Express 2.0 x16 slots for quad CrossFire should you want to go all out graphics crazy.

Memory

First Choice: G.Skill 6GB Triple Channel Memory Kit - PC3-12800 (1600MHz)
UK Pricing: £164.70 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $159.99 (ex Tax)

With a Core i7 920 at 4GHz you'll need some memory to complement it; 1,600MHz parts are perfect and should provide a mammoth amount of memory bandwidth. These G.Skill DIMMs are a very low 1.5-1.6V making them easily within Core i7 safe specifications. One downside of these modules is that they don't have Intel XMP but, more importantly, they do feature a lifetime warranty.

The triple-channel kit means they are matched and qualified to work with Core i7 CPUs and, while 9-9-9-24 isn't hugely fast, the mammoth bandwidth should certainly make up for this. Prices have really tumbled for 6GB DDR3 kits this month, with close to £100 coming off the price of this particular kit, softening the blow of the increased CPU costs.