How do you know when it’s time to replace your gaming rig? When you’ve turned down all of the game settings to minimum and you still have to play at 1024x768. Or you’ve just completed the Steam hardware survey and Valve rejects your score because it’ll drag down the curve. Of course, if you’re asking the question in the first place....

In spec’ing this year’s gaming build, we decided to restrict ourselves to a budget of approximately $1,400. This would provide a nice challenge, but would still give us enough cash to build a powerful and feature-filled machine. If you’ve ever tried to squeeze high-end performance into this price point, you already know that the road to our final configuration wasn’t clear, obvious, or easy.

The truth is that there are many ways to skin a Tribble, and there is no single right config for everyone. To give you some insight into how we arrived at our final destination, we’re going to walk you through our decision-making process.

When building, optimizing, or troubleshooting a computer, an adept hardware monitor is an extremely useful tool. HWMonitor allows you to keep track of all of your system’s important vital stats, and because it’s created by CPUID, creators of CPU-Z, HWMonitor has impeccable support for even the newest hardware. With its temperature monitors, it’s an ideal tool for any overclocker, and with its voltage monitors, energy-conscious underclockers will be happy, too. For those with HTPCs or other noise-critical systems, the fan-speed reports will help you identify the maximum fan speeds to keep your system as quiet as possible while still providing adequate cooling. HWMonitor even supports notebook hardware, giving battery-power levels, capacities, and even wear levels. CPUID also offers a Pro version for about $25 that provides additional functionality, like remote monitoring and history graphs. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the setup process, and explain HWMonitor’s features.

Continue reading after the jump.