Build Your Own

Over the week we build and test low-, mid- and higher-cost systems at standard and overclocked rates. Then we compare them and look at price-performance. Today, it's our under $1,000 low-end build.

AMD fans who want to overclock their processors can rejoice at news that the CPU maker is offering a Black Edition of its current fastest quad-core model.

While graphics drivers and third-party utilities allow you to overclock your graphics card's GPU and memory, pixel shader clock speeds can only be increased through the card's BIOS.

Intel introduced it's 45 nm Penryn technology 3 weeks ago. Today, on the same day AMD launched it's Phenom 9700 quad-core processor series, Intel announced the QX9770 (due Q1 2008). What's up?

Four cores, 45 nm structures and overclocking up to 4 GHz make Intel's Penryn Core 2 CPUs faster and more efficient. How bad does it look for AMD?

In Part 3 we focus on the hardware for the solar arrays used to generate power for our PC. We fretted over every half-watt to obtain the longest possible up time even on cloudy or rainy days.

After a grueling four days of benchmarking and tweaking, it's time to see how our three systems compare in baseline performance, overclocked performance, and total value.

Armed with our low, mid, and high end systems, we do some overclocking and see how each scales when pushed to the limit...

Staying within budget is easy when the limit is $4,000, but can our $3500+ system really prove its worth?

With our solar-powered PC and supporting components up and running, we present a variety of relevant data in near real-time.

ABS shipped us its latest CrossFire system and it came to play! It clearly provided all of the performance of the big guns but at less than half the cost.

Now that we've tested them, it's time to compare our three overclocked systems. How does performance stack up when compared to price?

We look at what components make an ideal budget overclocker's system. With a few bucks and some guts, you too can have a low-cost rig that runs with the big boys.

The "High-End" build from our first System Builder Marathon is ready to show its overclocking stuff. We show you the results and present our overclocking recipe.

Over the next 3 days we overclock Dell's factory-overclocked XPS 720 H2C, our high-end System Builder Marathon PC and a new budget build. We pull it all together on Friday.

We look at some of the inspired ideas submitted for the iRobot Create Challenge.

The last day of Computex brought us GPS devices, a supercomputer-in-a-box, perfect HD video applications, DTX cases without suitable motherboards, and the first true DYI notebook.

This time we analyze the impact on power consumption of RAM speed and timings, graphics card generation, hard drive type and form factor and of typical add-on cards.

You don't have to buy the latest energy-efficient PC hardware to save energy and reduce heat dissipation. Small steps already can make a difference.