System Buyer’s Guide: $1700 Performance Midrange
by Mike Jones and Jarred Walton on May 12, 2010 4:52 AM ESTBase System Components
Here's a recap of the common system components.
| Common System Components | ||||
| Hardware | Component | Price |
Estimated Shipping |
Rebate |
| Cooling | COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 Plus | $27 | $3 | |
| Video | Gigabyte HD 5850 1GB (OC) | $310 | $8 | |
| Memory | G.Skill Ripjaws 4GB DDR3-1600 F3-12800CL9D-4GBRL | $110 | ||
| Hard Drive | Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB WD1001FALS | $100 | ||
| Optical Drive | LG BD/HD DVD 10X BD read/16x DVD read/write UH10LS20 - OEM | $105 | ||
| Case | Cooler Master Storm Scout SGC-2000-KKN1-GP Mid-Tower | $80 | $10 | |
| Power Supply | Corsair CMPSU-750TX 750w 80 PLUS Certified SLI/CrossFire Ready | $110 | ($20) | |
If you’re interested in overclocking—or if you’re a builder simply looking for a quieter cooling solution than the retail fan—the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus is tough to beat in the performance midrange segment. With its single 120mm PWM fan operating between 600-2000 RPM, the Hyper 212 offers nearly silent operation at light loads (down to 13dBA), and manages to move an impressive 76.8 CFM at a fairly quiet 32 dBA maximum. Its four heatpipes make direct contact with the processor, facilitating rapid transfer of thermal energy, and it includes clips for mounting a second fan should you desire even more airflow. At $30 including a fan, it’s a great buy, and it works with both 1156 and AM3.
Continuing the theme of high performance/high value, the G.Skill Ripjaws 4GB DDR3-1600 CAS 9 kit—featured February’s PCs for Under $1000 guide—remains a compelling a choice, with a high bang for the buck ratio. Running at a low 1.5v, and reportedly solid overclockers, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better DDR3 solution in this price range. They also come with a lifetime warranty. Dropping down to DDR3-1333 (not that it won't likely overclock to DDR3-1600 speeds anyway) will only save about $7, so it's really not worth your time in our opinion.
The video card of choice for this system is the aforementioned factory overclocked Gigabyte Radeon HD 5850 1GB. As noted in last fall’s 5850 article, this part is the value alternative to the potent 5870, delivering between 85% and 90% of the performance of the larger card (depending on resolution) for roughly 80% of the money. Moreover, as prices on the GTX285 have remained significantly higher—despite the superior performance of the DirectX 11 5850—and a $30 or more premium seems too much to ask for the 2%-8% performance gains offered by the GTX 470, NVIDIA does not at present threaten the 5850’s value position. In short, the 5850 occupies a sweet spot in the desktop graphics card market, and doesn’t appear to have a direct competitor. It offers a ton of performance and, though not cheap, it appears to be the card to beat in the performance value segment. This particular card—with its GPU overclocked a mild 40MHz from the factory—delivers slightly upgraded performance for the same price as a stock card, or less. If you don't care about gaming, obviously you can downgrade to a number of less expensive GPUs.
The Corsair 750TX—another carryover from last year’s performance midrange system—is still a strong bargain, with a final cost of $90 after rebate. It has an impressive feature set—including a single 60A 12V rail—is 80 PLUS Certified, and SLI and CrossFire ready. It continues to enjoy a sterling reputation as a stable, quiet power supply, and offers some headroom for future system upgrades down the line. While you could certainly build this system with a smaller power supply—many manufacturers recommend a 500W minimum for the 5850—the 750TX is such a strong value, and a solid power supply is such an essential component to system stability, that it remains an easy choice here.
Those looking to run a lower spec PSU with a single GPU will be fine with the little brother of our recommended PSU, the CORSAIR CMPSU-400CX 400W. Priced at $50 (with a $10 MIR), it should be more efficient when your system is idle while still providing enough juice for the 5850. If you are thinking about going the Clarkdale route and/or a less powerful GPU, then we'd definitely recommend the 400W PSU as a more sensible choice. Just don't try running SLI/CrossFire setups.
Though the time for suggesting the purchase of an SSD boot/OS disk in this segment appears to be drawing closer, prices just aren’t there yet for most of us. In the meantime, builders will certainly be satisfied with the tried-and-true Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s. It has earned a reputation as a reliable drive, and consistently outperforms other 1TB 7200RPM drives in benchmarking. There are less expensive alternatives, however, and, if you don’t mind a slight drop-off in drive performance—unnoticeable for most users—this is a good part to look for on the cheap. 1TB 7200RPM drives are available from all of the major manufacturers for $80 or less.
For those of you that prefer faster random access times (useful for loading multiple apps at once), SSDs start at around $100 for a 32GB model. It won't offer the raw performance of the top SSDs, but for random access it will still be an order of magnitude faster than a conventional HDD. Really it's a question of balancing priorities, and you can go many different routes with a budget of $1000+.
Though Blu-Ray burners continue to be too expensive to recommend for this segment, the capability to read them is a must have in the performance segment. The good news is that the prices of Blu-Ray/DVD combo drives have fallen to the point that $105 buys you an LG UH10LS20 with 10X BD read speeds and 16X DVD burns. If you require Blu-Ray burning capability, an LG WH1LS30 can be had for around $160. Naturally, if you have no interest in Blu-ray you can swap this drive out for pretty much any DVDRW and save $80...which as many have pointed out in the comments is enough to get you very close to adding a small OS+Apps SSD like the OCZ Onyx.
Rounding out the base system is the case. There was a lot to like about the Cooler Master Storm Scout when we recommended it for last year’s performance midrange system, as it brought a lot to the table for $100. Today? Checking in at $80, that same case is a serious bargain and, because it offers a lot without breaking the bank, it seems like a proper home for the performance midrange system. It offers quiet, effective cooling courtesy of 1 x 120mm and 2 x 140mm fans, screw-less design, a control panel for adjusting LEDs and fan speed, eSATA, USB and audio connectivity via a top-mounted I/O panel, and even a carrying handle should you require some mobility out of your desktop. It also offers plenty of room for your peripherals, offering five 5.25” and six 3.5” drive bays. The style might be a bit flashy for some—the handle, red LEDs and overall military-tech feel skew a bit toward the LAN party crowd—and more conservative builders might prefer a more buttoned-up option. For those users, we suggest looking at the Lancool PC-K56, a quiet and well-designed steel case by the highly regarded Lian Li, available for the same price.
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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.)