January 2007 Buyer's Guide: Midrange Menagerie

Midrange Gaming Configuration

We've covered nearly all of the component choices necessary for a high-quality gaming solution already. The one major change that we would make would be to cut costs in most areas other than the graphics card, and then spend a large portion of the budget on getting a GPU that's as fast as possible. Here's what we came up with.

Intel Mid-Range Gaming System
Hardware	Component	Price	Rebates
Processor	Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 (1.86GHz 2MB Shared) - Retail	$185
Motherboard	Biostar TForce965PT (P965 775)	$111
Memory	OCZ S.O.E 2x1GB DDR2-667 (OCZ2SOE6672GK)	$221	$30
Video Card	eVGA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB (640-P2-N821-AR)	$400	$20
Hard Drive	Seagate 320GB SATA 3.0Gbps 7200RPM 16MB (Barracuda 7200.10)	$90
Optical Drive	LG Black 18X DVD+R (GSAH22N-BK)	$36
Case	Cooler Master Centurion 534 (RC-534-KKN2-GP)	$66	$10
Power Supply	Rosewill SLI 600W (RP600V2-S-SL)	$73
Display	Acer AL2223Wd 22" 5ms (1680x1050)	$314
Sound Card	Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer 7.1	96
Speakers	Logitech X-530 5.1 70W Speakers	$74
Keyboard and Mouse	Microsoft Comfort Curve 2000 B2L-00047	$28
Operating System	Windows XP MCE 2005 (with Vista coupon)	$115
Bottom Line		$1809	$1749

We pretty much took the base Intel midrange configuration and made several focused upgrades. The most significant change is going to be the inclusion of a GeForce 8800 GTS graphics card, and many people will be content to stop there. The GeForce 8800 GTS features DirectX 10 support (which of course will require Windows Vista and an updated public driver before it becomes useful) and it uses NVIDIA's new G80 core. We can't really evaluate DirectX 10 performance yet, but in currently shipping games the only single GPU solution that's faster than the 8800 GTS is the 8800 GTX. The GTS isn't a whole lot faster than AMD's X1950 XTX, and there are even a few games where it's slightly slower, but given the relatively similar prices and the improved feature set most gamers will prefer NVIDIA's offering right now.

Besides the upgraded graphics card, we felt most gamers would appreciate moving to a larger LCD. We chose the Acer 22" LCD without HDCP support rather than the Sceptre we mentioned on the previous page, because many gamers really don't care too much about HDCP. We also added the larger 600W Rosewill power supply, and in order to get the most out of games we felt the inclusion of Creative's Sound Blaster X-Fi was warranted.

Core 2 Duo generally does very well in gaming benchmarks, and anyone looking at doing even a moderate amount of overclocking will definitely get more mileage out of a Core 2 Duo chip. However, if you spend an equal amount of money on an AMD system, you can get an X2 4600+ that typically falls between the E6300 and E6400 in gaming performance (at stock speeds). Given the number of A-list games that currently benefit from multiple processor cores (all three of them!), you can even take things one step further and pick up a single core Athlon 64 3800+ to save even more money.

That said, we really hope 2007 will finally be the year where dual core processors begin to show more of a benefit in games. With such a high-end graphics card, the CPU could very well become a bottleneck, and several triple-A titles scheduled for the coming year look poised to put more of a strain on the CPU. While it might be interesting to contemplate using a single core processor with a high-end GPU in a gaming system, long-term that may prove to be a limiting solution and we don't recommend it.