Build Your Own No-Compromises Mid-Range PC

With the right parts and a little bit of elbow grease, you can have yourself an affordable DIY rig that does it all!

Any fool can spec out the ultimate Dream Machine. Just open up your wallet, pull out the Visa card, and tell the web store to overnight its most expensive parts to you. Voila! You’ve got the makings of a badass rig.

It’s an entirely different story when you’re building a machine on a budget. You’ve got to carefully weigh your options, consider every possible combination of parts, and make choices you know you can live with—because, typically, you will make some sacrifices. To be honest, the whole process can be downright painful. The last time we built a mid-range PC (February 2007), we had to break so many of our own minimum spec guidelines that no one was truly satisfied with the results.

But this year is different. We found the job of building a rig in this price range actually pleasurable—with minimal trade-offs. In fact, we’re tickled pink with the quality of the hardware we got into this box. So much so, we can unabashedly say that this PC can stand up to damn near any task. Read on to find out what parts we picked, why we picked them, and why there’s never been a better time to assemble your own no-compromises PC on a budget.

Parts and Price List

• Videocard
  Visiontek Radeon HD 4870
  www.visiontek.com
• Motherboard
  MSI P45 Platinum
  www.msicomputer.com
• CPU
  Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550
  www.intel.com
• Memory
  Patriot 4GB DDR2/800
  www.patriotmem.com
• Case
  Gigabyte Poseidon 310
  www.gigabyte.us
• Power Supply
  PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750
  www.pcpower.com
• Operating System
  Windows XP Professional (OEM)
  www.microsoft.com
• Hard Drive
  Samsung HD103UJ
  www.samsung.com
• Optical Drive
  LG GBW-H20L Blu-ray
  www.lgc.com
• Soundcard
  Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
  www.soundblaster.com
  

Why We Chose these Parts

Intel’s 2.8GHz Core 2 Quad Q9550 CPU

The PSU includes two cables with six-pin connectors, one of which has a break-away two-pin connector that we won’t need (but that gives us the option to run an even more powerful videocard down the road).

The connectors will click into place in the back of the Radeon HD 4870 board (image C, although we used a single-socket Nvidia board as a stand-in). Now plug the power cables into the SATA drive and the optical drive. It’s time to fire this mutha up!

We briefly toyed with the idea of using AMD’s new Phenom quad core for this year’s mid-range PC. After all, AMD has priced the new CPU quite attractively. There’s also an argument for the forward-looking upgradability of the AM2 platform.

In the end, however, we decided to go with Intel since its current performance roadmap is unquestionable.

We remain nervous about where AMD is headed. While it’s new Radeon GPUs are a hit, the CPU division seems to change direction each quarter; it’s just safer to go with Intel right now. And it doesn’t get any safer than the Core 2 2.83GHz Quad Core Q9550.

Enough applications now take advantage of four cores that we felt compelled to go quad with this year’s box. Being able to squeez a 45nm CPU into our mid-range box makes us doubly happy. 

In a nutshell, we see Intel’s 45nm Penryn processors as the mainstream future for Intel. We’ll run the Q9550 for another 12 to 18 months and then  see how far Nehalem prices have fallen by then.

We’re not giving up on AMD, either. There’s always the chance that the company’s CPU team will take a page from their GPU colleagues and produce a part that knocks Intel back on its heels the way the Radeon 4800-series has knocked Nvidia for a loop.

We can dream, can’t we?

MSI’s P45 Platinum Motherboard

Once we decided to go with an Intel CPU, we had a hard time selecting a chipset/motherboard combination.

We considered rolling with an Nvidia chipset, which would have given us the option to run videocards in SLI down the road, but AMD’s Radeon 4800-series GPUs are such a great value that we decided we’d be satisfied with a CrossFire configuration if we decided to add a second videocard down the road.

We even considered (albeit briefly) a board using AMD’s 790GX chipset, which has integrated graphics and is capable of running in hybrid mode (switching over to a dedicated videocard when the workload warrants). The candidate was Gigabyte’s MA790GP-DS4H, but we quickly discovered that the 790GX’s hybrid mode limits you to a lowly Radeon HD 3400-series videocard.

In the end, we decided that Intel’s P45 platform made more sense for our needs. Intel chipsets are rock-solid—you don’t have to worry about any of the teething pains third-party chipsets often experience, especially with new CPUs.

So we selected MSI’s P45 Platinum. It’s not exactly cheap, but neither is it extravagant. It supports PCI Express 2.0, offers a host of memory-tweaking options, and support for up to 16GB of memory.

AMD’s Radon HD 4870

Trying to configure a new PC can be a massive mind bender. You’ll have to not only figure out which CPU you want and what CPU you’re going to eventually upgrade to but also factor in the GPU choice and its potential upgrade path.

We’ve long chosen Nvidia-based videocards because they’ve been incredibly fast for the money. But Nvidia took their eye off the ball this last design cycle and AMD took supreme advantage, moving to a smaller process size that enabled them to build a killer GPU that delivers performance equivalent to Nvidia’s best but at a fraction of the cost.

We could have gone cheaper still and dropped a Radeon HD 4850 in our shopping cart, but we saved enough money on the rest of our components that we could splurge just a wee bit.

What about CrossFire? The appeal of running dual videocards is limited to ultra-high-resolution gaming. Even then, CrossFire doesn’t actually run games any faster until driver updates are released.

As sexy as it is to pack multiple cards, we think it makes more sense for mid-range buyers to buy one very fast card. When it’s time to upgrade again—typically in 18 months—your money is better spent buying the fastest next-generation card.

4GB Patriot DDR2/800 RAM

One of the glaring weaknesses with last year’s mid-range PC was RAM. With RAM prices through the roof at that time, all we could afford was 1GB of DDR2/800.

Well, what a difference a year makes. While 1GB cost $150 last year, we were able to buy 4GB of Patriot DDR2/800 RAM for much less than $100 this year.

Why Patriot RAM? At this price, it’s all about bang for the buck, and after surfing the online stores, we picked the Patriot modules because they offer slightly better-rated latency for about the same cost cas the competition.

Our RAM configuration isn’t that simple, though. Although the board posts just fine with 4GB, running a 32-bit Windows OS doesn’t quite give you full access to all the RAM.

Check Windows XP and it’ll report only 3.25GB free. So has the other .75GB of memory been wasted? Not quite. It’s a complicated issue, but Microsoft argues that even if the applications cannot use all 4GB of RAM, the OS, and even the drivers, will, so the additional headroom does help.

All we know is that we’re happy to quadruple our RAM footprint for less money than we spent last year. Now that’s what we call positive technological progress.