Affordable All Rounder

We put modesty aside last month and said that "of all the months since we started our buyer's guide, for £400 we think this May build is the best value bundle we've ever put together so far." For £400, the Affordable All Rounder offers a surprising amount of power for both gaming and work. This month we've not made many substantial changes to the PC, although disappointingly, the Radeon HD 4770 is pricier in its retail guise than we were initially told. Perhaps it's something to do with the manufacturing issues we reported on last week.

This small quibble aside, you do still get a terrific PC for a small outlay, and with 4GB RAM and a dual-core CPU, it's quite happy to run plenty of applications at once. The setup allows for a decent amount of overclocking too (close to 4GHz from what we've seen) thanks to the Pentium E5200 CPU, Gigabyte motherboard and reliable Corsair PSU.

Graphics Card

First Choice: ATI Radeon HD 4770 512MB
UK Pricing: £77.53 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $99.99 (ex. Tax)

It seems that the more wallet friendly end of the graphics market is now well and truly in AMD's hands, as the ATI Radeon HD 4770 is now the third different AMD card to have occupied the spot of recommended affordable graphics card, following in the footsteps of both the Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4830.

The HD 4770 isn't just a refresh though, as the RV740 GPU at its heart is manufactured using the latest 40nm process from TSMC, thus making the GPU itself smaller and less thermally demanding, while also lowering power consumption too. We also found the reference model to be a champion overclocker, with a whole lot of extra performance ready to be opened up with a little patience and luck.

Even the more commonly available version with an aluminium cooler, which we feared would suffer from underpowered cooling, performs brilliantly and shares the reference card's overclocking potential.

Stock performance is excellent and the HD 4770 is able to at least match, and for the vast majority of tests it betters Nvidia's competing 9800 GT in every game we tested. It's a wonderfully capable card at lower resolutions, especially at 1,280 x 1,024 or 1,680 x 1,050, and is particularly capable when you start to crank the anti-aliasing settings upwards, which can really help image and visual quality at these lower resolutions. For a mid-range gaming system, there's nothing that can touch it for the price.

Processor

First Choice: Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200
UK Pricing: £51.95 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $69.99 (ex. Tax)

While its on paper specs of just a stock speed of 2.5GHz, 2MB of cache and an 800MHz front side bus might seem limited, there’s nothing diminutive about the performance you can easily get out of this little budget dual-core wonder chip. Despite a gradual upward creep in prices following high demand and rubbish exchange rates, it’s still a good £20 cheaper than similarly clocked chips with 1,066MHz FSB and 3MB of cache, making it fantastic value.

The real beauty of this 45nm Wolfdale CPU though is the low FSB and high 12.5x multiplier, giving it a huge amount of overclocking headroom. Even a novice should be able to safely hit speeds of over 3GHz with this chip, and Rich managed to push the retail sample we received from Novatech to a whopping 4GHz using only basic air cooling – not bad for a few pence under £52!

Even if overclocking is as foreign to you as a razor is to Joe, at stock speeds the E5200 is still more than capable of tackling modern games while remaining very cool and consuming very little power. Simply put it’s an absolute little stormer of a processor and, for the price to performance ratio, there's very little out there which can touch Intel's Pentium Dual-Core E5200 at the moment.

Motherboard

First Choice: Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L
UK Pricing: £68.67 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $73.86 (ex. Tax)

Based on the P43 chipset design and boasting an ICH9 southbridge and six SATA ports, it's a little bit better featured than the older budget board we favoured, the P31, although it still lacks CrossFire or SLI support needed for multi-GPU configurations with its single PCI-E x16 slot. However, on a budget we always recommend a better single GPU over two mediocre ones.

Nevertheless, the board layout is still very good and the quality of the BIOS remains high, making overclocking intuitive and simple, although it does lack the ability to save BIOS setting profiles. We've spec'd the EP43-UD3L for our US friends because the DS3L is more expensive and harder to find in the States, yet, the UD3L is actually slightly newer with a better spec as well - you lucky devils!

While it’s worth mentioning that for just $10 more you can get yourself a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L based on the enthusiasts' favourite P45 chipset, for the purposes of our budget and overclocking our E5200, the EP43 is still a fine choice.