The Grand Experiment
The sweet spot for the budget-conscious

Our Econobox is suitable for budding enthusiasts, but its budget only allows for so many goodies. That budget gets doubled for our mid-range build, allowing us to assemble a pretty powerful box while keeping the total cost close to a grand.

Processor
The Core 2 Duo E8400 remains our weapon of choice for the Grand Experiment thanks to its strong performance and power-efficient Penryn core. Compared to 65nm Core 2 offerings, Penryn brings 45nm process technology, architectural enhancements that deliver improved clock-for-clock performance, and incredible overclocking headroom. We've seen numerous reports of users pushing the E8400 from its default speed of 3GHz to in the neighborhood of 4GHz with modest air cooling.

Some might say the Core 2 Quad Q6600 would be a more sensible choice, since it packs two additional cores for only $20 more. However, the E8400 has a 600MHz clock speed edge and a clock-for-clock performance advantage over the Q6600, making it considerably faster in all but a handful of tasks optimized to take full advantage of more than two processor cores. Such applications are few and far between at the moment, but if you value parallelism over single-threaded performance, check out our alternatives section.

Motherboard
The grand's experiment's more substantial budget allows us to splurge on a P45 motherboard, and Gigabyte's GA-EP45-DS3R looks like one of the best entry-level P45 offerings out there. As we explained in our review of the board, the DS3R delivers all the necessary goodies for an enthusiast system: two physical PCI Express x16 slots, dual Gigabit Ethernet, FireWire, and excellent overclocking potential. We managed to push this particular board to an impressive 500MHz front-side bus speed in our labs, which would be enough to push our Core 2 Duo E8400 to 4.5GHz.

Memory
Once again, Mushkin's 4GB DDR2-800 kit remains our staple memory recommendation throughout much of this guide. A quick look at the kit's price tag reveals why: $79.99 is a steal for four gigs of DDR2-800 RAM, especially since it comes from a reputable manufacturer and features a lifetime warranty. With Windows Vista and most newer games guzzling memory like there's no tomorrow, 4GB of RAM is by no means over-indulgent, either.

Naturally, you'll need a 64-bit operating system to take full advantage of this amount of memory. 32-bit OSes have enough address space for 4GB of memory, but that figure is an upper limit for all memory in a system, including video RAM. In practice, 32-bit versions of Windows will only be able to use 3 to 3.5GB of actual system RAM, and they'll normally restrict each application's RAM budget to 2GB. There are potential workarounds, but Microsoft says they can hurt compatibility; it recommends that folks run a 64-bit version of Windows instead. Because Vista x64 is quite mature these days, we recommend it for this system. Check our operating system section on the second-to-last page of the guide for more details.

Graphics
Being the fastest overall contender at the $200 price point, AMD's Radeon HD 4850 makes perfect sense for the Grand Experiment. Significantly faster cards cost around $100 more, and even slightly cheaper offerings don't pack quite the same punch. And the 4850 does pack a very mean punch: it manages to outperform the $400 GeForce GTX 260 in some games, and it keeps up with the $300, dual-GPU Radeon HD 3870 X2 in many others. On top of that, our recommended motherboard can support two 4850s in CrossFire mode should you feel like upgrading.

As you may already know, Nvidia recently dropped its GeForce 9800 GTX to $200 to more directly target AMD's latest mid-range Radeon. The 4850 is generally faster, but we still found the 9800 GTX worthy of a mention in our alternatives section on the next page.

Storage
Western Digital's new 640GB Caviar SE16 offers excellent performance, very low noise levels, and an ample 640GB capacity at a tantalizing 16 cents per gigabyte. Samsung's 750GB SpinPoint F1 only costs about $20 more, but the Caviar offers more consistent performance across a wider range of applications, which is why we prefer it.

On the optical front, we're sticking with the Samsung SH-S203N; it's a decent DVD burner that should be a good match for this system.

Audio
Asus' Xonar DX makes our primary recommendations here for the same reasons as in our Econobox alternatives. This card trumps competing Creative offerings with better sound quality, better features, and EAX 5.0 emulation capabilities.

Enclosure and power
Our recommended Antec Sonata III delivers everything we need for this system: a beefy 500W power supply with an 80% efficiency rating, a clean layout with sideways-mounted hard drive bays, and a host of noise reduction features, including a speed-adjustable, rubber-damped 120mm exhaust fan. This case even has an eSATA port on its front bezel, should you wish to plug in a speedy external hard drive.