The Grand Experiment
The sweet spot for the budget-conscious

Where the Econobox delivers the basics you need for an enthusiast PC, our Grand Experiment's more ample budget gives us room for parts with a little more punch. Here, we can add some of the latest and greatest components to the mix while keeping the total system budget reasonable.

Processor
Like our graphics card choice for the Econobox, our CPU selection for the Grand Experiment may elicit a double-take from more than a few readers. Hear us out, though. We've traditionally stuck to fast dual-core chips for this system for two reasons: quad-core CPUs are expensive, and they typically have lower clock speeds than their dual-core counterparts, which leads to lower performance in many tasks.

What's different now? First, other components have become cheap enough to give us room for both a quad-core CPU and a comparably meaty graphics card. Also, the Core 2 Quad Q9400 runs at 2.66GHz, which should make it more than fast enough in single-threaded apps. Sure, you'll get higher performance from a 3.16GHz Core 2 Duo E8500 in those instances, but the Q9400 won't be very far behind, and it'll perform far better with software that can tap its extra cores. And with both AMD and Intel pushing developers to parallelize software, those extra cores should become increasingly useful as time goes on.

If you still don't care about multi-threaded performance and would rather save a few bucks, feel free to check out our alternatives section on the next page for a dual-core CPU recommendation.

Motherboard
The Grand Experiment's more substantial budget allows us to splurge on a fancier motherboard, and Gigabyte's GA-EP45-DS3R looks like one of the best sub-$150 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 ports, 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 crank our Core 2 Quad Q9400 up to 4GHz.

Memory
Kingston's 4GB DDR2-800 kit will stand in as our staple memory recommendation throughout much of this guide. $71.49 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
Despite blowing almost $300 on a quad-core processor, our budget still has room for a Radeon HD 4870. We invite readers unfamiliar with AMD's latest high-end GPU to check out our review of it. Without going into too much detail, the 4870 is arguably the second-fastest single-GPU card on the market right now, losing little ground to Nvidia's $450+ GeForce GTX 280. The 4870 performs so well that it almost makes exotic multi-GPU configs pointless in current games unless you have a giant LCD monitor—not bad for something affordable enough to slip into a mid-range PC.

Nvidia fans may object to our selection on grounds that the GeForce GTX 260 costs about the same as the 4870 and performs nearly as well. We think the 4870 takes the cake overall, but we've given the GTX 260 a spot in our alternatives section on the next page.

Storage
Western Digital's 640GB Caviar SE16 delivers excellent performance, very low noise levels, and an ample 640GB capacity at a very tantalizing 13 cents per gigabyte. Samsung's 750GB SpinPoint F1 only costs about $25 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-S223Q; 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 superior sound quality and EAX 5.0 emulation capabilities.

Enclosure and power
The Antec Sonata III costs more than the Econobox's NSK 4480, but it has more goodies: 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. Antec even slaps an eSATA port on the Sonata's front bezel, should you wish to plug in an external hard drive without crawling behind the system.