PC Hardware Buyer's Guide September 2010

Gaming Workhorse September 2010

While our Enthusiast Overclocker system is built around getting maximum performance on a reasonable budget, you’ll have to step up the hardware scale to get excellent all-round performance. With about a grand to spend you can build yourself an enviable PC that can take heavy gaming at 1,920 x 1,080, and is capable of processing a heap of RAW images or encoding video or audio pretty quickly.

New This Month

Again, the theme this month has been price drops across the board. We’ve happily watched the price of the CPU, motherboard, RAM, hard disk and PSU drop by a fiver each. These aren’t big changes by themselves but they add up quickly, especially when you add on the £35 drop most Radeon HD 5870s have seen over the last month. This has allowed us to splash out in other areas of the build and the first thing we’ve done is upgrade the CPU cooler to the Thermaltake Frio. The Frio is as good as the Titan Fenrir in its single fan configuration but allows the added flexibility of adding the second bundled fan if you need some extra cooling power for any reason.


We’ve also upgraded the case as while the old Xigmatek Utgard is competent, it's hardly a looker. We’ve replaced it with the excellent Silverstone Raven RV02, the review of which will hit the site this week.

And The Rest

We’ve stuck with the HD 5870 we slotted into this build last month, but if you want to spend significantly less than £1,000, a heavily overclocked 1GB GeForce GTX 460 would do you proud. The card will deliver great gaming performance at 1,680 x 1,050 and merely very good performance at 1,920 x 1,200 which is a bargain for £190.

No matter what size of screen you have, the GeForce GTX 465 isn't a good option, however - it may sound faster than the GTX 460, and cost more (£200) but it's actually slower. Don't be tempted by this turkey of a GPU.

If you're into your gaming audio, then the Asus Xonar Xense card-and-headset bundle might be of interest for this system. It's finally on sale, and for less than £200, making it well worth a look if you're serious about audio.

Similarly, if you've got over £1,000 to spend, you might opt for a cheap SSD to add as a games drive - see our SSD Buyer's Guide for our recommendations. Or just head to the 64GB Crucial C300 review instead.


The AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition makes more of a claim for consideration in this PC than the Enthusiast Overclocker as it did perform well in heavily multi-threaded tasks such as video encoding and 3D rendering - i.e. the 'workhorse' part of this machine. At stock speeds, we saw a score of 1,992 in our video encoding test, which was much faster than the 1,224 of the Core i7-860, while Cinebench 10 returned a score of 18,671 on the X6 1090T BE and of only 17,032 on the i7-860. While the i7-860 was still outperformed by the X6 1090T BE in the video encoding test when both were overclocked (1,565 compared to 2,391) the i7-860 scored 23,749 points in Cinebench 10 rather than 22,073.


We’ve still chosen the i7-860 for this PC, as it scored 1,621 overall in our Media Benchmarks rather than the 1,367 of the X6 1090T BE. We can also pair the i7-860 with the excellent Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 motherboard while the X6 1090T BE works best in a motherboard with an AMD 8-series chipset – the best value board we’ve seen to date is the £120 Asus M4A89GTD Pro/USB 3, meaning that the X6 1090T BE option costs £40 more than the i7-860 and is less versatile.

As we wanted to keep the budget under £1,000, we couldn’t stretch to a ‘proper’ Core i7 system alas. With an Intel Core i7-930 still costing £210, a decent motherboard £150, and 6GB of memory now costing £45 more than 4GB we’d have been spending another £150. Even opting for a £193 Core i7-920 would have left us with a significant overspend.

Still, we’d have a brilliant system for that little bit of extra outlay, so if you’re happy to spend nearer £1,000, you have our blessing.

As previously stated, we like having 4GB of memory in our PCs, and we’ve chosen 1,600MHz DDR3 to give us a bit of headroom for overclocking the CPU. For example, if we wanted to aim for a 4GHz overclock we’d use a Base Clock of 191MHz (as 191 x 21 = 4,011).

If we’d opted for 1,333MHz memory, we’d have to use the 6x memory strap with this Base Clock, which would give us a memory frequency of 1,146MHz, which is a bit slow. With the 1,600MHz memory, we can safely use the 8x memory strap and have our memory run at a more healthy 1,528MHz. We wouldn’t recommend overclocking 1,333MHz memory to 1,528MHz for everyday use unless you really know your DRAM.

We’ve also listed the brilliant Antec TruePower New 650W PSU, a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 hard disk and a cheap SATA DVD drive. We’ve also added an Asus Xonar DS sound card to avoid conflicts with the Realtek audio codec of the motherboard and enhances the sound generally.

If you haven't got a copy already, you might want to factor in a copy of Windows 7 - if you're confident that you won't be upgrading much, then an OEM copy should be fine, but serial upgraders need the pricier retail version.