High-End Buyers' Guide: May 2007
by Dave Robinet and Jarred Walton on May 29, 2007 1:30 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Basic High-End Intel System
One of the few components held over from our October 2006 High-End Guide, the E6600 processor has dropped in price and remains the sweet spot for high-end purchasers at the $2,000 system range. The processor is known to be an excellent overclocker, and provides an even better value after Intel's price cuts. And speaking of price cuts, it's no secret that Intel is planning another round of price cuts in late July. If you can hold out another month or so, you just might be able to pick up a quad core Q6600 in place of the E6600 for a minor price increase.
Prices of 680i chipset-based boards have been dropping recently, which gives the EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR its place in the baseline high-end Intel system. There were indeed some 975X motherboards which cost roughly the same, but as these implementations leveraged the ICH7 controller rather than the more-expensive ICH7R and an NVIDIA SLI currently continues to require NVIDIA chipset motherboards, it made sense to give the nod to the EVGA 680i solution.
There are potentially more overclock-friendly solutions like the ASUS P5B Deluxe, which costs roughly the same as the EVGA board and has a wider breadth of overclocking options. It runs on the P965 chipset, however, which sets it at a disadvantage in that one of the PCIe x16 slots can only run at x4 bandwidth, rather than giving each card the full x16. Again, such solutions also lack official NVIDIA SLI support so you would need to look at AMD graphics cards if you want to run a multi-GPU configuration. As mentioned already, however, running a single 8800 GTX in place of 8800 GTS SLI can save some money, avoid some headaches, and would be a great fit for a P965 platform.
We went with OCZ Flex XLC memory in the Intel high-end system. In our labs, this memory has reached 1T timings at speeds even slightly higher than 800MHz on 680i platforms. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this is an excellent pair of memory sticks at the sub-$180 price point.
The remaining components are all carried over from the AMD baseline system. The price for the Intel system comes in slightly higher than that of the AMD system, though the $2000 price point is maintained. Note that the Intel system configuration will show superior performance in virtually all applications compared to the AMD system, largely due to the Core 2 Duo's advantage over its Athlon X2 counterpart. If you're looking to overclock, the Core 2 Duo E6600 will also easily outperform any current AMD Athlon X2 processor, often by huge margins. It's not unreasonable to get 3.6 GHz and higher with E6600 chips when using an appropriate aftermarket CPU heatsink, and at present AMD lacks a dual core chip that can even hope to compete with such an overclocked processor.
This system gets Windows XP 32-bit, like the AMD baseline system. If you do choose to go above 2GB of memory, however, please ensure that you do move up to a 64-bit OS - preferably Vista at this point in time.
| Basic High-End Intel System | |||
| Hardware | Component | Price | Rebates |
| Processor | Core 2 Duo E6600 | $223 | - |
| Motherboard | EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR | $159 | - |
| Memory | OCZ Flex XLC 2GB Kit DDR2 PC2-6400 | $179 | - |
| Video Card | 2x EVGA NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS 640MB | $700 | $60 |
| Hard Drive | Samsung SpinPoint HD501LJ 500GB | $112 | - |
| Optical Drive | Pioneer DVR-212BK | $42 | - |
| Operating System | Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 SP2B (OEM) | $110 | - |
| System Total | $1525 | $1465 | |
| Complete Package | $2061-$3720 | $2001-$3660 | |
 |
Prices of 680i chipset-based boards have been dropping recently, which gives the EVGA 122-CK-NF63-TR its place in the baseline high-end Intel system. There were indeed some 975X motherboards which cost roughly the same, but as these implementations leveraged the ICH7 controller rather than the more-expensive ICH7R and an NVIDIA SLI currently continues to require NVIDIA chipset motherboards, it made sense to give the nod to the EVGA 680i solution.
There are potentially more overclock-friendly solutions like the ASUS P5B Deluxe, which costs roughly the same as the EVGA board and has a wider breadth of overclocking options. It runs on the P965 chipset, however, which sets it at a disadvantage in that one of the PCIe x16 slots can only run at x4 bandwidth, rather than giving each card the full x16. Again, such solutions also lack official NVIDIA SLI support so you would need to look at AMD graphics cards if you want to run a multi-GPU configuration. As mentioned already, however, running a single 8800 GTX in place of 8800 GTS SLI can save some money, avoid some headaches, and would be a great fit for a P965 platform.
We went with OCZ Flex XLC memory in the Intel high-end system. In our labs, this memory has reached 1T timings at speeds even slightly higher than 800MHz on 680i platforms. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this is an excellent pair of memory sticks at the sub-$180 price point.
The remaining components are all carried over from the AMD baseline system. The price for the Intel system comes in slightly higher than that of the AMD system, though the $2000 price point is maintained. Note that the Intel system configuration will show superior performance in virtually all applications compared to the AMD system, largely due to the Core 2 Duo's advantage over its Athlon X2 counterpart. If you're looking to overclock, the Core 2 Duo E6600 will also easily outperform any current AMD Athlon X2 processor, often by huge margins. It's not unreasonable to get 3.6 GHz and higher with E6600 chips when using an appropriate aftermarket CPU heatsink, and at present AMD lacks a dual core chip that can even hope to compete with such an overclocked processor.
This system gets Windows XP 32-bit, like the AMD baseline system. If you do choose to go above 2GB of memory, however, please ensure that you do move up to a 64-bit OS - preferably Vista at this point in time.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
Last I checked, they weren't readily available yet. Considering we explicitly mention this in the text on the first and last pages (as well as in-between), I'm pretty sure we've covered the situation. The official launch is next week, at which time all the websites respecting the launch date (Newegg and ZipZoomFly are usually the benchmark here) will start selling them. I'm not sure most of the sites listing the boards have them in stock and ready to ship today as it stands; if they can't be trusted to follow Intel's launch date, can their inventory claims be trusted?Latyshev - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
Ah, sorry, i didnt read the article in detail, just looked over the major points. Thank you for clarification.Tuffrabbit - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
Quote " Audigy users may get support in the future, but at present they are left out in the cold. "Man what a drag that Vista has been out now four months and still there are issues with sound cards, guess I'll wait some more before upgrading the operating system...
AnnihilatorX - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
I don't see why the SLI GeForce GTS is not a good investment. The performance seen in many benchmarks definitely have 40% edge over a single Ultra. GTS 320MB SLI is also very affordable and have the aforementioned performance on resolutions less than 1900 while bearing more performance/$ than ultra/GTXTilmitt - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
There's no point in including the operating system cost, most of us pirate it. And rightly so!punko - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
Pirate? I don't think so.Dual boot machine: Linux/legit windows for work/play
If you're spending the money for a "high end" machine, there is no reason not to go fully legit.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
Besides, if you're so cool that you can pirate the software, I'm sure you can handle doing a little bit of math to subtract the cost from the total. I have to say that anyone looking to stiff The Man by stealing $120-$200 of software on a $5000 system needs some counseling about what's important in life.Martimus - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
Speak for yourself. I stopped pirating software once I got a real job. When I can't afford to buy the software, I just don't buy it now.yacoub - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
On the concluding page is a list of soundcards (though very little is said about them).The Auzentech card has a name though: It's the X-Meridian 7.1 which you can see by going to their website. Not sure why you list it as "AZT-XM71" since I've never seen it listed that way except as the part number part of the heading at NewEgg.
http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/x-meridian....">http://www.auzentech.com/site/products/x-meridian....
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N8...
I'm sure it's an awesome card, btw, as I have their X-Plosion DTS 7.1 card and love it. It's been flawless for me in gaming and offers excellence in sound reproduction for games, movies, mp3s, etc.
yacoub - Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - link
If you are buying two GTS 640MB, shouldn't the $30 rebate also be counted twice? (I'm looking at the first system.)