System Builder Marathon: $1,250 Enthusiast PC

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Hard Drive And Case

Hard Drive : Western Digital Caviar Black 640 GB 32 MB Cache

One of the trade-offs we made to lower the price of the system to $1,250 from the last marathon build’s price of $1,500 was to surrender a hard drive. Sure, we’re not running a RAID array in this PC, but to be brutally honest, the typical user isn’t typically going to see a big real-world performance jump with a RAID array anyway.

Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital’s Caviar Black 640GB

Instead, we’re going for a single Western Digital Caviar drive, the 640 GB with 32 MB of cache. For $85 it offers a lot of space and good transfer speeds for a single drive.

Case : Antec Three Hundred

Read Customer Reviews of Antec’s Three Hundred Chassis

The chassis was another trade-off we made for financial reasons, so we gave up Cooler Master’s great Cosmos 1000 in favor of the frugal, but trusty, Antec Three Hundred.

For $55, we’re not buying at the top of anyone’s line, but we are getting a simple, good-looking case that’s built well and does the job. Our only real beef with the Three Hundred is its lack of a front intake fan, but the two 120 mm fans on the rear and top of the case do a good enough job of keeping the interior cool, especially when we’re using a dual-slot video card like the Radeon 4870 X2.

Don Woligroski
65 Comments Comment from the forums
  • WINTERLORD
    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
    Reply
  • theblade
    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.
    Reply
  • craig hallworth
    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.
    Reply
  • gallesol
    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.
    Reply
  • marraco
    ...
    It look like you never waited crysis to load.

    ... and the power is far overkilling. It could be saved money on it
    Reply
  • Rifte
    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.
    Reply
  • derek_c
    I would definitely like to see a Core i7 configuration next time.
    Reply
  • Rifte
    $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%
    Reply
  • 3lvis
    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).
    Reply
  • radguy
    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.
    Reply