System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Performance Midrange
by Mike Jones and Jarred Walton on May 12, 2010 4:52 AM ESTMonitor, Speakers, and Input Devices
If you don’t already own these components, here are some additional peripherals to fill out your shopping cart.
| System Accessories | ||||
| Hardware | Component | Price |
Estimated Shipping |
Rebate |
| Display | ASUS VW266H Black 25.5" 2ms (GTG) HDMI Widescreen LCD Monitor (1920x1200) | $310 | $12 | ($30) |
| Speakers | Logitech X-540 70 watts 5.1 Speakers | $89 | ||
| Input | Microsoft Comfort Curve Desktop 2000 Black USB Keyboard and Optical Mouse – OEM | $28 | $8 | |
| Operating System | Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium OEM 1-Pack (for System Builders) | $100 | ||
For an LCD, you could do a lot worse than the 25.5 inches of 2ms, 1920x1200 real estate offered by the ASUS VW266H. ASUS continues to build quality LCDs and includes HDMI connectivity (if not cables) at surprisingly low price points. Currently priced at $310 ($280 after mail-in rebate), the VW266H offers crisp images, good colors, D-Sub, DVI, HDMI, and component connectors, as well as an SPDIF out. It doesn’t include an HDMI cable, but for a monitor of this size at this price it’s difficult to complain.
Stepping down to 23” 1080p can save $100 or more and allows you to choose between several 23” 1080p displays. The ASUS VH236H is an attractive option, offering performance and connectivity on par with its larger sibling, and is currently available for $200 ($180 after $20 mail in rebate). Acer’s popular and well-regarded 23” P235Hbmid is another compelling option at the $200 price level, and it even includes an HDMI cable. If you’re really looking to shave off a couple of extra pennies, you can purchase the 21.5” 1080p ASUS VH222H for $170 ($160 after $10 mail in rebate), which is similar to the 23” version in every respect except for size.
All of the above offer great blends of value and performance, along with excellent connectivity. While you can certainly find less expensive 23” or 21.5” monitors, most will not include an HDMI connector, and you will want to be sure to research any bargain monitor whose price seems too good to be true. As the adage suggests, more often than not, “you get what you pay for.” Note that all of the displays are also TN panels, which work well enough for most users but certainly won't surpass quality IPS displays. If you want an IPS display, expect to pay around twice as much as the TN panels for a similar size display.
As the “speakers” included with most monitors are jokes no one seems to find particularly funny, it is difficult to recommend using them for anything other than a bargain basement machine. They certainly have no place in the sound system of a performance midrange machine. For a 5.1 system, the 70 Watt Logitech X-540 will definitely get the job done nicely, especially when you consider its $89 price tag. It won’t be mistaken for an audiophile grade rig, but it’s a great fit for gaming surround sound without breaking the bank. Logitech also offers a more robust 505 Watt system, but at $377 the THX-certified Z-5500 is difficult to recommend for a midrange system. As an aside, there is a disappointing lack of quality surround sound systems available in the $100-$350 price range, which makes it difficult to recommend other options.
There are many options in 2.1 systems, however, and it shouldn’t be hard to find something that will sound nice and fit your budget. The 200 Watt, THX Certified Logitech Z-2300 is a popular choice among system builders, and offers a loud (120 watts RMS) subwoofer. At $150, it offers a good mix of performance and price. The Creative Inspire T3130 2.1 speakers are a considerably less expensive option, though at $50 they are of course somewhat less robust (20 Watts total). Just the same, they will be a vast improvement over any speakers that come in the same box as your monitor.
For input devices, the Microsoft Comfort Curve Desktop 2000 fits the bill as the old standby. The keyboard is fine and, if you have no intention of gaming, the mouse will suffice for basic computing tasks. However, someone building this machine—and spending over $300 on a graphics card—probably intends to game with it. If that same someone doesn’t already have a gaming mouse they love, the Logitech MX518 is a popular option and at $43 won’t kill the bankroll. It features eight programmable buttons, custom sensitivity settings, and delivers 1800 dpi resolution. A slightly more upscale option is the Logitech G500, which costs $57, features 10 buttons, a dual-mode scroll wheel, resolution up to 5700 dpi, and the ability to adjust its weight to your preference.
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strikeback03 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Flip that around, what would you call a system with a 980X and multiple Fermi GPUs if this is high-end? I suppose you could call this the bottom of high-end, upper-midrange or lower high-end is really semantics.I wonder why they keep saying the i5-750 is faster than the i7-920 in most benchmarks when Bench shows the opposite.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
So a Porsche 911 Turbo S is midrange because there happens to be a Bugatti Veyron that costs more than 10 times as much?In my opinion, midrange is the "typical" range. What the average person would buy. Low end is below that, high end is above that. This is not something the average person would buy. But this argument is actually quite irrelevant, imho. You can't "prove" that something is mid-range, that depends on personal factors. I repeat, I was just stating that it was my opinion that this is rather high-end.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
By that definition, midrange is a $600 Dell. ;-)You can go so many routes with a $1000 to $1750 build, and whichever route you go and whatever you call it, it's still a $1000 to $1750 build. For the price and for a complete system, I'm very comfortable with the recommended components. If you don't want Blu-ray, I assume you're all plenty smart and can manage to not add the Blu-ray drive and--GASP!--even put a DVD-RW in its place. I figure the same goes for the GPU, storage, case, keyboard, mouse, and LCD. All of those are literally drop-in replacements, and we have plenty of other articles reviewing things like SSDs for the interested.
In my opinion, the biggest decision in any build really comes down to the choice of motherboard. That's the one where you have to really think about what you want and what you're willing to spend. And I spent time chatting with several others here just to make sure we had good motherboard recommendations.
As for high-end, I personally start that at $2000 and go up. This is close to that, which is why it's "performance" midrange--or "upper" midrange if you prefer. At $2000, I'd seriously push for adding an IPS LCD, and if you give me $3000 to work with, there's no beating 30" LCDs (still) with most likely a 5970 GPU to drive it. Or you can grab three 24" LCDs and run them in portrait mode. I'd also call that sort of setup "Dream" but regardless of the label it's still just a really expensive and fast PC.
artifex - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Jarred, I agree, the biggest thing to think about is obviously the motherboard. Could you give a little more insight into your decision that 890FX isn't worth it? I'll be buying a board quite soon, and up until today, based on info here and at TechReport, I'd been leaning heavily towards an FX-based board, with the same CPU you selected. Since I don't need the latest and greatest graphics support, however, the GX's integrated one would be fine. ("Performance" for me is a solid number cruncher that also does some HTPC and storage duty. The only game I play for now is WoW.) I'm trying to build this thing to last more than 3 years without heavy upgrading, though :)JarredWalton - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
I talked with Raja about the motherboard and chipset, and he said that the primary benefit of 890FX over 890GX is better extreme overclocking. 890FX also has dual x16 links for CrossFire while 890GX will drop to x8/x8 for dual GPUs. So if you don't plan on running dual GPUs and you don't intend to pursue extreme overclocking, 890GX is a great chipset.artifex - Thursday, May 13, 2010 - link
Thanks, Jarred. I think you just saved me a bunch of money.Benoit_P - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
Good article. One taking the time to read it calmy and understand the caveats will find how to modify the hardware list.However, I think that you have overlooked the fact that the 890FX chipset can do virtualization, something the other 8xx chipsets are incapable of.
Given that running WinXP mode in Win7 Pro/Ultimate requires virtualization capabilities, this is an important point for some users.
The article does not mention virtualization capabilities for the intel builds either.
Question:
Does a PC used only for photo editing (Photoshop) and video capture/editing/encoding (Première) from an HD camcorder (AVCHD codec) benefits at all from a powerful graphics card ? or can do with an embedded solution ?
BP
JarredWalton - Friday, May 14, 2010 - link
I know Photoshop benefits from GPUs now (via OpenGL), but I don't know how much of a difference there is between IGP and dGPU. I don't know if Premier benefits from GPU or not, though I know there are other video manipulation applications that leverage CUDA (in which case the AMD GPU we selected wouldn't help, obviously).As far as virtualization, I thought that was the CPU that handled that. I wasn't aware of any limitations with 890GX not supporting virtualization. It appears that the IOMMU isn't virtualized except in 890FX, which isn't a problem with Xen, Hyper-V or VMware ESX but prevents its use with WinXP Mode on Win7.
Honestly, I hear about Virtual WinXP in Win7 so often that it's really quite surprising, as I don't know of a single person who uses it. I'm sure businesses do, but do home users really care? I have been using Vista on my machines since 2007, and outside of a few 64-bit compatibility issues (which have since been solved with updated applications), I haven't had any apps that didn't run properly. Who is actually using this (which means you need to buy Win7 Business or Ultimate... a small minority of home users), and what are they using it for? It just seems like something 99.99% of people won't ever use.
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
Let me rephrase that, the midrange is the typical pc a consumer buys with a specific goal in mind. What the average person with (game-)performance in mind buys, thats what I call midrange.But anyway, why would de motherboard be the most important part? There is barely any difference between specific motherboard, except for some very specific features that most of the people don't need. When looking at motherboards, performance is a non-issue, there is barely any difference. The only difference is features, but what are features that are so important that you need to have them, but not important enough so that not all motherboards have them? (And no, I'm not stating that any motherboard is ok, I just wouldn't know.)
Phate-13 - Wednesday, May 12, 2010 - link
And damn it's annyong that there is no "edit" button.Anyway, if everything is a drop-in replacement, than what is the point in making a guide at all?
(Though again, let it be clear, I really like the effort that is put in these articles, but there is a fundamental flaw with these guides, almost any guide. And that is that every person has different needs and the persons who can adapt these configs to their needs are often the persons who actually don't need a guide, while the ones who can use a guide very often don't know anything about it and what to and what not to replace.)