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• Graphics: Two MSI GeForce GTX 295 Cards In SLI Three weeks ago, Nvidia proved to us that while two graphics processors are great, four can be better. We concluded that the only reason to buy more than one GTX 295 was for bragging rights, but with so much invested in the rest of our system, we really wanted those bragging rights. Read Customer Reviews of MSI's GeForce GTX 295 1,792 MB A Newegg special on the MSI N295GTX-M2D1792 was enough to seal the deal for us, but a recent price drop for another brand could have made the choice more difficult. With two brands of reference-design cards now available for the same price, our selection process would hinge on the level of the warranty and service if we were to make the purchase today. System Drives: Two Intel X25-M 80 GB SSDs In RAID 0 One of the most repeated complaints from our previous $2,500 PC was its use of a 2.0 TB RAID 5 array consisting of three 1 TB drives. We had chosen RAID 5 for its redundancy and limited loss of capacity, but questions concerning its performance and overhead were only answered after testing it. The integrated ICH10R controller extracted minimal overhead from our CPU, but the tradeoff was limited transfer performance. Our hopes of something “in the middle” quickly vanished when we saw the PCMark performance scores. Our budget increase would have left room for a hardware RAID card to boost RAID 5 performance, but many readers wanted to see a build based on SSDs. Using top-model SSDs would again price us out of the hardware RAID controller market, but SSD technology’s resistance to catastrophic failure allowed us to scale back to a performance mode that didn’t require hardware control. Non-redundant RAID 0 also receives little benefit from hardware RAID. Read Customer Reviews of Intel's X25-M 80 GB SSD Super-fast single-level cell (SLC) drives are tiny and we wanted enough space to store a few programs for faster launch times. Multi-level cell (MLC) drives, on the other hand, are larger and cheaper, but are typically slower. Intel got around the “slow MLC” problem via parallelism in its 10-channel X25-M drives. We knew that we’d need at least 128 GB and a 160 GB X25-M would have provided the capacity we needed without completely blowing our budget. Fortunately, each Intel X25-M 80 GB drive costs half as much, allowing us to seek the performance benefits that a RAID controller’s Level 0 mode is known for. For those who can’t remember RAID controller-level details, Level 0 mode divides data across two drives and the array size equals the total capacity of both drives. (Actually, since RAID means redundant array of independent disks, a non-redundant Level 0 mode can’t logically be called RAID.) The 80 GB X25-M dropped by an amazing $120 per drive between the day we ordered components and the day we finished testing. That $240 difference is the primary reason our budget wasn’t used up by the addition of other performance gear. Storage Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB Any high-end machine is going to have capabilities beyond gaming and those capabilities place higher demands on storage. A super-fast Core i7 processor and 6 GB of RAM should make our $5,000 PC ideal for heavy tasks such as 3D rendering and video editing and the accumulation of related files can quickly increase storage needs by hundreds of gigabytes. We chose Seagate’s Barracuda 7200.11 1.5 TB hard disk drive as a quick-and-easy way to add mass storage without slowing down our system. Read Customer Reviews of Seagate's 1.5 TB Barracuda 7200.11 A single part number ST31500341AS doesn’t cost much, but we had already devoted the majority of our budget to performance hardware. Subsequent price drops will allow buyers to add a second 1.5 TB drive in RAID 1 for redundancy, without exceeding a $5,000 limit.

• Intel introduced its flash disk product line at IDF in August 2008; now we’re seeing the first product sample. The firm intends to release mainstream products based on affordable MLC flash technology first at 80 GB capacity, offering both 2.5” and 1.8” form factor standards using the SATA/300 interface. The 1.8” version is based on micro SATA. Higher capacity versions at 160 GB will follow later, as well as the high-speed X25-E at 32 GB and 64 GB. These professional drives will be based on SLC flash, and while the MLC-based X25-M reviewed today should appear at retail in October, the SLC version X25-E won’t be available before the end of the year. The fact that there are several SSD products scheduled for 2009 makes it clear that Intel intends to traverse the storage path on a mission. Next year will see a shrink from 50 nm to 34 nm, which we expect will double storage densities. The roadmap talks about 160+ GB for the MLC devices and 64+ GB for the SLC models. Intel expects the disk drive market to be shrinking in favor of flash-based or flash-assisted solutions, which isn’t really surprising: flash memory is on the brink of replacing conventional hard drives in high-end servers, where transaction performance and I/O capabilities count most, and in the lowest end, where 8 GB to 32 GB flash is smaller, more robust and more affordable than any hard drive. But as soon as capacity is required, flash drives don’t stand a chance, and they will continue to cost considerably more per gigabyte. Intel sees a massive future for hard drives that come with an additional cache memory—so-called hybrid hard drives (H-HDDs). Unfortunately, we haven’t seen any new hybrid drives since their first appearance in mid-2007, so we’re curious to see what the future might still bring. It does make sense, but the first implementations could deliver neither improved battery life nor improved performance. Roughly 30% flash-based drives by 2012 still seems optimistic, but these numbers may include an increasing number of netbooks and low-cost PCs for emerging countries, which will for sure only be equipped with low-cost flash storage. Although the new X25-M drive is targeted at the mainstream, we found that it will be highly attractive even for enterprise environments, just because the Intel flash SSDs are extremely dominant when it comes to I/O performance. Click the image on the right to look at Intel’s comparison between hard drives and flash SSDs when 120 drives are used in an enterprise environment. Although it’s heavily biased towards flash drives (SAS hard drives provide much more than the shown 100 MB/s throughput), it makes a good point: flash SSD arrays offer better throughput, around 20x to 100x better I/O performance and they only require a fraction of the energy to deliver this performance. We’ll look into this in our benchmark section as well.

• CPU: Intel Core i7-920 With a wide pricing spread between the three available LGA-1366 processors, a $2,500 budget limited this system to the least-expensive Core i7-920. There isn’t much to gain from moving to the Core i7-940, although the copper cooler of the costly Core i7 Extreme Edition 965 would have been handy. Read Customer Reviews of Intel's Core i7-920 We were hoping for a D0 revision core, but instead received this late-production C0 stepping retail sample. Newegg doesn’t designate the stepping revision. The limited space between the motherboard and power supply of our cube-shaped case severely restricted our cooling options. Silverstone sells a Nitrogon cooler that fits without any fan, but even users of otherwise cool-running Core 2 processors have expressed concern about insufficient cooling when using the power supply's intake fan to move air past Silverstone's sink. We were stuck with the stock Intel Core i7-920 boxed aluminum cooler, longing for the copper cooler of Intel's more expensive Core i7 EE-965. RAM: Mushkin Enhanced 998679 6.0 GB DDR3-1600 Mushkin’s 998679 6.0 GB triple-channel kit first got our attention as a mid-priced product with high-end DDR3-1600 CAS 7-8-7-20 timings in January’s high-end memory comparison. The price has dropped by around 50% since then, making it a top-choice moderate-budget kit. Read Customer Reviews of Mushkin's Enhanced 998679 6GB Kit While the former modules had reached impressive clock speeds, constant changes in IC availability has put these more recent samples in the 1,800 MHz class. Rather than fight for the highest possible clock speed, we instead chose to seek better-than-rated timings in today’s overclocking tests. HDD: 2 x Western Digital RE3 500 GB in Level 0 Since a RAID controller’s striping mode doesn’t actually live up to the redundancy part of the RAID name, our performance-only array is better described as Level 0. Level 0 makes two drives parallel for up to twice the peak throughput, while the RAID controller is responsible for splitting data into packets across the drives (writes) and combining it (reads). A single solid-state drive (SSD) might have been chosen if this were a “gaming only” system, but our SBM builds balance gaming performance and multi-tasking capabilities. Thus, we really needed a terabyte of storage to assure that an average enthusiast won’t run out of space while working with high-definition video files and super-large photo albums. Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's RE3 500 GB Western Digital’s WD50002ABYS drives provide several RAID-oriented features that likely have little benefit in a simple two-drive Level 0 array. On the other hand, these RAID Edition 3 family drives still offer the same performance improvements found in the company’s most recent Black Edition desktop drives, are further validated for 24/7 operation, and include an enhanced five-year warranty. Because so large a Level 0 array can put months or years of data at some risk, we suggest connecting this system to a storage solution and scheduling data backups once a day Optical: LC GGC-H20LK Blu-ray Disk/HD-DVD ROM with DVD±R/RW The Blu-ray disk format is expected to take off eventually and we’d hate to see anyone who can afford a $2,500 system get left behind. LG’s combo drive adds HD-DVD to its read capabilities, allowing buyers to purchase heavily-discounted movies in the dead format. Read Customer Reviews of LG's GGC-H20LK Blu-ray Drive Nearly everyone needs CD or DVD write capabilities, so LG tossed those in as well. The GGC-H20LK won’t break any burn-speed records at its 16x DVD±R rating, but it gets the job done without requiring a second drive that our compact case wouldn’t support. Newegg packed our drive with the Tom Clancy aerial warfare game H.A.W.X by Ubisoft. Intel Core i7 I7-920 Quad Core Processor... (5 offers) Online shop Price Dell Home $349.99 Newegg.com $279.99 TigerDirect $279.99 ServerSupply.com $350.00 TechCenter $264.99 See more products