
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3-1866 Memory Kit 8 GB (2 x 4 GB)
This dual-channel kit boasts an XMP memory profile with 9-10-9-27 timings at 1866 MT/s, while sipping power at a mere 1.5 V. Selling for $103 on Newegg at the time of writing, it's priced as expected for high-performance memory in this RAM-hungry market.

Read Customer Reviews of Corsair's Vengeance LP 8 GB Memory Kit
System Drive: Samsung 840 EVO 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD
Currently selling for $90, Samsung's 840 EVO 120 GB SSD offers respectable value for a system drive. Our own Christopher Ryan is particularly smitten with this repository, praising its performance and value-added features that keep data safe, despite triple-level-cell flash memory.

Read Customer Reviews of Samsung's 840 EVO 128 GB SSD
Hard Drive: Western Digital Black 500 GB
When it comes to choosing the right hard drive given limited funds, you need to balance capacity and performance. This quarter, I chose to favor speed.
Assuming 500 GB is enough storage space for music, movies, and pictures, $71 gets you Western Digital's high-performance Black with an impressive five-year warranty. Of course, if you need to house terabytes of data, you'll want a larger drive. That might necessitate stepping back to a slower-spinning disk instead.

Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Black 500 GB Hard Drive
Optical Drive: LG Black OEM Blu-ray Burner
A standard DVD burner sells for around $20. But if you fancy using your PC as a media center, a Blu-ray writer gives you a little more flexibility. LG's WH14NS40 is going for $54 on Newegg after a temporary promotion, and I consider that to be a reasonable expense, given the options it opens up to enthusiasts.

- Taking The SBM Down A Different Road
- CPU, Motherboard, And Cooler
- Video Card, Power Supply, And Case
- Memory, Hard Drives, And Optical Storage
- System Assembly And Overclocking
- Test System And Benchmarks
- Results: Synthetics
- Results: Media Transcoding
- Results: Rendering And Productivity
- Results: Adobe Creative Suite
- Results: Compression Tools
- Results: Battlefield 4 And Arma 3
- Results: Grid 2 And Far Cry 3
- Power And Temperature
- A Core i7 And Flagship GPU Impress, Naturally

(1) You could include temperatures and acoustics performance in the overall assessment, given I think that is a big part of the case buying decision, and
(2) A way to factor in the intangibles (i.e. blu ray vs dvd, choice of SSD/HDD, etc), you could include a separate vote between this quarter's and last quarter's to see what the readers would choose for the best build given all the performance factors, aesthetics, and other components that do not contribute directly to performance. The reader's vote of this quarter vs. last quarter and/or an overall value winner for this quarter could be included in the final write-up.
I would also 2nd the vote for starting 4K testing. And also, why not 1440p? It seems those two resolutions are more relevant now in 2014 at the level of this competition than 1600x900 and 4800x900 resolutions.
Hmm.... What percentage of the performance measures in this article are for gaming?
I'm thinking a selection of CPUs as a fixed starting point, and GPU decisions based on remaining budget. Maybe an i7, i5, FX-8, and an APU.
Would be really interesting to see the performance differences across workloads by allocating budget between CPU and other components.
Already done for ITX. See here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-your-own-haswell-overclocking,3608.html
I'd second the uATX. In fact, I'd really like to see Crash attempt a uATX dual-gpu setup.
Frankly, it was the cheapest available card when the systems were ordered.
Nope.
The purpose is to have a resolution that the low-budget PC can operate at for the comparison article at the end of the week.