For that very reason, we started writing these System Buying Guides a few years back. We have three categories of Buying Guides: Budget, Mainstream and Performance. Our Budget Guide has a spending limit of $650, the Mainstream limit is $1,200 and we allocate $2,000 for our Performance Guide.
The systems that we piece together here are designed to give you the best overall experience under the given budget. Obviously, if you are a gamer, you would probably want to spend more money on a video card than other components. Our guides are designed with overclocking in mind, so we often select lower-end processors / memory / video cards to save money, because we know these can be overclocked to equal or outperform higher priced hardware. All of our guides exclude common components such as a mouse, keyboard, monitor, OS, etc., under the assumption that you already own these items.
With that said, let's continue forward with our September 2007 Performance Buying Guide...
Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
When it comes to sheer price vs. performance value, there is no better chip on the market than Intel's Q6600. With four cores operating at a default speed of 2.4 GHz, you are all set for a crazy fast system. Those who do video editing, gaming or just a lot of multi-tasking will find this processor a dream come true. And, if you are lucky enough to get the G0 stepping, get ready for some insane overclocking and great temperatures.
Heatsink: Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme
We picked the Thermalright's Ultra-120 eXtreme heatsink to keep our Q6600 cool. Thermalright has a reputation of being one of the best heatsink manufacturers on the planet. The Ultra-120 will certainly cool the processor more efficiently than the retail Intel heatsink, but more importantly, will allow for much more headroom when pushing the processor to the absolute limits. A 120mm fan of your choice is used to keep the massive array of fins nice and chilly.
Motherboard: eVGA 680i
I have been running an EVGA 680i board in my test system for several months, and while it was a bit of a pain to get up and running (early BIOS issues), the board is totally solid and super stable now. It has plenty of SATA ports, good Northbridge cooling, two PCI-E x16 slots for SLI and a very thorough user manual. I have no doubt this board will allow you to take the quad core to well over 3 GHz.
Memory: OCZ Platinum 2 GB PC2-6400
This is the same memory kit that we selected for our budget and mainstream buying guides. This memory operates at 800 MHz, features low timings of 4-4-4-15 and comes with OCZ's lifetime warranty. 2 GB is the minimum amount of memory I would put in a new build these days. This ensures the memory subsystem won't be a huge bottleneck for the rest of the system. We went with this kit over a higher-end kit mainly because of the heatsink we selected. Some high end memory kits have large heatspreaders, which would present a clearance issue with the Thermalright heatsink.
Video Card: eVGA 8800 Ultra
An ultimate performance system deserves the ultimate graphics solution, and our budget allowed us to go all-out and splurge on this eVGA 8800 Ultra card. This is the fastest of the three eVGA 8800 Ultra cards, operating at a blazing fast 655 MHz core speed. This DX10 card will certainly hold every gamer over for a very long time. No longer can you use your VGA card's lack of power as an excuse for getting pwn3d!
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 500 GB SATA 3.0 GB
For our performance guide, we selected the Seagate Barracuda 500 GB drive. This is a SATA II (3.0 GB) drive that operates at 7200 RPM and an average latency of 4.17 ms. I have been using two similar Seagate drives in my RAID 0 array for over a year now and am very happy with their performance thus far. 500 GB should be plenty of space for all of your games, music and videos.
Power Supply: Ultra Products X3 1,000 Watt
We used the 800w model of this power supply in our mainstream guide and liked it so much that we went with the 1,000w version for this guide. The unit is 100% modular and uses flex-force cables which are very easy to route and tuck away for a clean install. The 135mm fan in this power supply is whisper quiet. The finish on the power supply itself is mirror-like and would look great in any system.
Optical Drive: Lite On SuperAllwrite Dual Layer DVD Burner
This is the same optical drive that we selected for the budget and mainstream guides, and for good reason. The drive is extremely cheap (I've never been fond of buying a "high-end" optical drive), offers pretty much everything you would expect from a quality drive and even comes with two different bezels (one black, one white) to better help match the color of your computer case. This drive uses a SATA interface, which is great because it eliminates the ugly IDE ribbon cable from your system.
Case: Your Choice
This is the segment of the guide that I leave totally up to you, the reader. More often than not, the decision for a case comes down to looks alone. There are a ton of great cases out here with some really good features, but you may not like one case simply because it doesn't fit your style, which is totally fine.
Conclusion:
Using our TTZ Media shopping engine to find the lowest prices on each of our components, we come up with a grand total of $1,811.95 (as of writing). With our budget of $2,000 this leaves us $188.05 to cover the cost of a case and shipping. The system put together here today offers one hell of a deal and should have all of your friends (except for that rich kid that nobody really likes) drooling with envy!
