System Builder Marathon: $1,250 Enthusiast PC

Features
By Don Woligroski
published

Power Supply, Optical Drive, And Video Card

Power Supply : Antec Neo Power 650W

We’ll admit there have been times we fell prey to the mantra that bigger is better, but when it comes to power supplies, there is such a thing as too big. As a result, we’re trying to do a better job of "right-sizing" this month’s selection.

Read Customer Reviews of Antec’s Neo Power 650 W

We chose Antec’s Neo Power 650 W PSU because we thought it’d drive our Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 CPU and AMD Radeon 4870 X2 video card combo without a fuss. With 57 amps between the three 12 V rails, it should even handle the beast when it’s aggressively overclocked.

Almost as important, Newegg is currently running a special where this PSU is $90 when purchased in conjunction with an Antec case. Since we chose the Antec Three Hundred anyway, this takes quite a bit off of our bottom line and allows us to come in closer to the $1,200 mark. Of course, as Paul explained yesterday, the rebates and specials available through online vendors vary day to day, so your mileage may vary.

Optical Drive : LITE-ON 20X DVD±R SATA Model iHAS120-04

Read Customer Reviews of Lite-On’s iHAS120-04

For under $25, Lite-On’s iHAS120-04 drive offers the "AllWrite" capability. While this is just a fancy marketing term for the ability to write DVD+/-R(W), DVD-RAM, and Double Layer discs, it’s still appreciated.

Video Card : PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 X2

Read Customer Reviews of PowerColor’s Radeon HD 4870 X2

In the interest of maxing out gaming performance, we decided to bring out the big guns. We kept the rest of the system relatively inexpensive for a reason : when gaming is your goal, you can’t really skimp out on the graphics card. Thus, we went for the fastest and most expensive single graphics card available, AMD’s Radeon HD 4870 X2.

With two of AMD’s RV770 GPUs on one card, it’s quite a large board and it thankfully comes with a dual-slot cooler to force heated air out of the case. So, increased temperatures don’t pollute the rest of the system.

At $529, PowerColor’s entry into the Radeon HD 4870 X2 foray is priced on the low-end of the scale. And when you consider the $20 mail-in rebate currently offered, it’s the cheapest option we could find, so we gave PowerColor’s flavor of flagship a nod.

Most of the 4870 X2 cards on the lower end of the price spectrum stick pretty close to the reference 750 MHz specification and PowerColor’s card is no exception, but we hope it will be able to kick things up a notch with some overclocking.

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