March 2007 Extreme Gaming PC Buyer's Guide - Page 5

Video Card: GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB

Current Cost: $560
Consecutive Guides: New
Price Change: N/A

The GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB has taken the PC gaming market by storm, featuring the highest performance of any single card, and often exceeding the frame rates offered by dual Radeon X1950 XTX graphics cards in Crossfire mode. A single GeForce 8800 GTX card is also less expensive than two Radeon X1950 XTX cards, making it the perfect choice for our only-slightly restrictive $4,000 total system budget.

The GeForce 8 Series is fully DirectX 10 compliant, and through its stream processors, includes support for unified shaders. The GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB is set at 575 MHz core, 1.35 GHz shader, and 1.8 GHz memory default clock speeds, which translates into a fillrate of 36.8 Gtexels/s and a memory bandwidth of 86.4 GB/s, both of which are significantly higher than even the GeForce 8800 GTS 320MB and 640MB models.

All the basic 8800GTX cards come with the same 575MHz clock speed and 768MB of GDDR3-1800 RAM, and those few "faster" versions come with little performance benefit at greatly increased expense. For our money, the PNY GeForce 8800 GTX 768MB (pictured above) is a super value, as is the EVGA GeForce 8800 GTX card (below).

LCD Display: Samsung SyncMaster 215TW

Current Cost: $470
Consecutive Guides: 2
Price Change: +$10

Nothing says more about the quality of a system than a superb LCD display, and our opinion hasn't changed since our last guide. The high-end 21" Samsung SyncMaster 215TW display featured in November's Extreme Gaming Buyers Guide makes a return engagement this month. A $10 price increase (to $470) since November's guide likely indicates that many customers are now appreciating it as much as we do.

The SyncMaster 215TW features an 8ms response time for its true 8-bit display - which is just a hair slower than the 6ms advertised for some 6-bit displays - but still far faster than our 12ms limit for a smooth gaming experience. A 178° viewing angle and height-adjustable base for both models makes perfect positioning easy.

Some buyers will of course prefer the 4:3 version (the Samsung SyncMaster 214T) of the above monitor. This may seem strange to wide-screen gaming aficionados, but it does allow the action of most games to fill the normal field-of-view without having the status bar intrude.

Added vertical space requires additional pixels, so the resolution for this display grows to 1600x1200 pixels, with a proportional increase in price to $560. Multiple inputs (DVI, VGA, Composite, S-Video), Picture-In-Picture and split-screen capability offer more ways to put this screen space to good use.

While evaluating other 21" displays still made the Samsung SyncMaster 215TW our top choice, we were concerned with screen real estate, since so many high-end systems now include 24" LCDs. Going overkill on screen size not only puts added pressure on our budget, but also may force users to look side to side or move the screen further away, both of which can encumber use. If ever we reach a consensus that more space is required, then 24" models would definitely come into consideration, such as the popular Dell 2407FPW.

Sound Card: Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS

Current Cost: $170
Consecutive Guides: 3
Price Change: -$5

Creative still has a lock on the discrete gaming soundcard market, so as long as there are no other brand choices, we might as well go with the top-end model. The X-Fi Fatal1ty XPS is not only a killer soundcard, but also gets boosted with 64MB of RAM for caching sounds, allowing faster processing for increased frame rates.

The Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty XPS features an ultra-high 109db signal-to-noise ratio and its EAX 5.0 audio effects first put in on our list in 2005, where it will remain until something better comes along.

Speakers: Logitech Z-5500

Current Cost: $260
Consecutive Guides: 6
Price Change: +$40

Speaker technology isn't exactly rife with change, and with the exception of electronic controls, traditional standards remain fairly consistent. Our guide mirrors this, and although the Logitech Z-5500 speakers have been with us for awhile, these continue to offer the top price-performance in their class and it wouldn't be surprising to find them on a seventh consecutive guide.

For gaming, the 5.1 channels on the Logitech Z-5500 speakers provide excellent directional sound, which still has not been surpassed by comparable 7.1-channel systems.