System Builder Marathon: $1,250 Enthusiast PC

yea for that kind of money i would definatly be buying a entry lvl core i7 920 setup with ddr3 1333, 3gb memory. for gaming, maybe go with a 4870, but in my opinion a geforce 260 or 280 would be better, because it's powerfull with games and you can use CUDA. cuda is really taking off tmperg has a video encoding software withat uses the graphics card, and it gives you a +400% to rendering video and such. such as bluray- and DVD encoding

Nice build, good performer for the price, looking forward for the next article.
It would be great to see an article in which several options of cooling would be compared to see which one gives a better overclock using the 8500 or 8600, including air and water cooling, this chips are awesome to do some OC.

I'd be interested to see the GTX 260 (216) in SLI on the mid range build as the price for two is a bit more but still comparable with the 4870x2 and, from what I've read, should be more powerful than the radeon card.

I don't know that you can consider the i7 a mid range platform when you have to spend ~350-400 bucks on the montherboard alone. I'd certainly use the i7 for the high end build though.

Thank you for your efforts.

There are some of us who who receive a great deal of disconfort thinking of Intel as the only microprocessor manufacturer around. If for no other reason than to maintain some competition in this critical industry, please include an AMD based system.

[the typical user isn’t typically going to see a big real-world performance jump with a RAID array anyway]...
It look like you never waited crysis to load.

... and the power is far overkilling. It could be saved money on it

Would of liked to see a direct comparison to the $625 build in all but the gaming benches. Is the more expensive mobo, ram, cpu combo worth it?
Put the 4850 in the $1250 system then do some game benches or put the 4870x2 in the $625 system.

I would definitely like to see a Core i7 configuration next time.

$276 vs $467 for a 5-8% increase in performance?

direct comparison

$1250 $625 %dif
Itunes 00:49 00:52 +6.1%
lame 01:30 01:36 +6.6%
TMPGE 04:46 05:04 +6.2%
Xvid 02:26 02:52 +17.8%
Mainconcept 03:04 03:17 +7.1%
Photoshop 01:12 01:15 +4.2%
3d Studio 00:45 00:49 +8.8%
Average +8.1%
Price diff for cpu,ram,mobo +69%

For the next build I would like to see an i7 920, a gigabyte extreme x58 board, 6GB of Gskill DDR3 1333 PC 10666 with cas 7, a pair of 4870x2's water cooled and 2,3,and 4 64GB Gskill SSD's in raid 0. As the price of SSD's comes down, my interest in how a bunch of them in Raid 0 perform goes up(inversely proportionally).

I think I would have picked up a cheaper p45 board and used the extra cash to pick up a couple of fans to help with the cooling issues. Otherwise pretty nice gaming build. I don't know if Enthusiast is the name I would use with 530 bucks going to graphics but thats me. Appreciate the info. Nice to kinda be able to compare the E2180 E5200 E8500 and Q6600 all at stock and oc'ed. Core i7 would be nice to add to the list as well as phenom in your upcoming builds.

good job th. way to listen to the readers

An i7 comparison would be nice. It looks like alot the the i920's are pushing 4ghz on air.

A recommendation to save some scratch for a video card:
Go with a dual channel DDR3 set instead of tri. The difference in performance will be negligible, and you can save a ton of money to put towards a video card.

With the extra $$$ go for a gtx280, or perhaps 2xgtx260s in SLI. And don't waste money on the 216 core versions, as there's almost no performance increase over the 192 core, and you can save quite a bit on the combo.

Unfortunately, these are "bang for the buck" builds and while AMD typically saves money, their products also often reduce performance. This is especially a concern since most of our benchmarks, just like real world users would expect, are limitted to the number of threads they support. Further, overclocking simply burries AMD under Intel.

Tom's hadn't the opportunity to try the new AMD cores, and these certainly weren't available in retail when the article was set up. The same goes for Core i7, which was released the middle of this month while the articles were set up the end of last month.

Remember that yours is just one voice, and imagine the flood of responses had Tom's used a slow AMD processor that didn't overclock well and relied on 3 or 4 thread apps to beat Core 2 Duo, with these dual-thread and single-thread benchmarks.

Good write up, I would have chosen a P45 board and used the saved money for a water cooling system.

I would like to see a E7200 make it in the next $625 budget build.

omg graphics cards arent like cpus >< they dont need sub 60/70 degree temps.

the build is good,the case,powersupply,memory. though i'm still puzzled on the temperatures made by the dual core on 1.4 volts.

but, i don't agree a lot of points in the conclusion.
water cooling is still too expensive and complicated, why not get a thermalright heatsink if you think you could have gone higher speeds, yet i still doubt it even if you watercool,maybe additional 200MHz.
i know, you know that a single 4850 is more practical than a 4870x2 since it as though we're paying for a dual card setup just to improve gaming only in Crysis or Farcry and other games don't give noticeable difference.
yet, that core i7 system you're planning is quite interesting. could lose a couple of FPS from this $1250 system but miles apart in rendering and encoding tasks.
around this budget, an overclocked quadcore makes more sense since this system won't differ much in performance compared to $625 build that also has a 4 GHz chip on it.

Now see, this is a much more realistic build. I even like the selection of case! That didn't hurt TOO much, did it?

I'd like to see what kind of performance the 4+ GHz dual-core and 4870x2 can do against the last SMB's mid-range system.

Please build the I7 system as soon as possible. I return from Iraq in January 2009 and what to build a I7 system like the one mentioned.
Also is there any way you can start adding a monitor in with the system price since you need one to use the system.

This is a very realistic bang-for-the-buck build. Thanks for a great article.