What Hardware Should I Buy? - March 2009

Graphics Card

Alternative: Nvidia GeForce 9800 GT
UK Pricing: £90.60 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $124.99 (ex. Tax)

Nvidia’s 9800 GT – effectively a rebadged 8800 GT with Nvidia’s Hybrid Power (which unless you’re running an Nvidia nForce 7-series motherboard for AMD processors, you’ll never use) took the market by storm when it was released in October 2007, claiming the title of best bang for buck card for a good eight months before the release of ATI’s Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4830.

While ATI has stolen the limelight of late though, the 9800 GT is still a great card and produces performance close to that of the HD 4830 in the majority of games. When you factor in that the two cards are now very similarly priced, choosing between them has become very tricky. While we think the HD 4830 just about edges it right now with a slightly lower asking price and marginally higher performance in the majority of titles, it’s a close run thing and there are advantages to owning Nvidia cards such as support for PhysX and CUDA, as well as superior Folding performance.

Processor

Alternative: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4850e
UK Pricing: £49.29 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $59.99 (ex. Tax)

Going the AMD route with your CPU and motherboard no longer means the savings it used to, especially as the price of a decent 780G motherboard is a fair bit more than similarly featured P31 or P43 Intel board. Nevertheless, for under £50 the Athalon 64 4850e will still get the job done, and this energy efficient 45W chip will comfortably outperform low end Intel Celeron and matches E2000 series chips, although comes in a long way behind the Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200.

Motherboard

Alternative: Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
UK Pricing: £67.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $79.99 (ex. Tax)

The problem with choosing an AMD processor is that you’re limited to AMD’s pretty dismal budget chipset choices - we found inexpensive boards using the 770X chipset were at best, mediocre, even if they do offer CrossFire support.

AMD's 780G on the other hand is an excellent chipset, allowing boards to hit the market for just over £65 and with the inclusion of the improved SB700 southbridge, there are even more SATA and USB 2.0 ports to play with too. Richard looked at this Gigabyte board back when 780G first launched and found it offered numerous high-end features and impressive performance considering the reasonable price tag. What's more, even though the Gigabyte board is limited to 95W CPUs, using the 45W 4850e we recommended above shouldn’t cause any drama.

In fact, having used the combination of the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H and Athlon 4850e every day in Richard's own home theatre PC, we can confidently say you’re getting a rock solid single GPU platform that's extremely low power and which can serve as either a home theatre PC, inexpensive gaming rig, or both.

In the US, again Gigabyte makes things a little awkward for us in stocking only the US2H - an updated version with a 2oz copper PCB, dual BIOS function and revised heatsinks (in colour, not mass), and the same board is available here for several Pounds Sterling more than the original S2H.

Memory

Alternative: Kingston 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400 CAS5
UK Pricing: £23.87 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $25.99 (ex. Tax)

While we’ve seen that 4GB of memory offers very real advantages over 2GB, if your budget just can't stretch, 2GB is sufficient for most of our needs and for less than £25 the price is certainly right. Rated at CAS-5, the Kingston kit isn't the fastest memory on earth, but at just 1.8V it should have a bit of overhead for some performance tweaking, just don’t expect to squeeze too much extra out of it.