October 2003 High-end Gaming PC Buyer's Guide

Introduction

In each month's edition of our High End Gaming PC Buyer's Guide, we are given $2500 in cash to spend, and go to the limit in search of the ultimate high-end gaming machine. However, we do not spend this money frivolously, and our tech savvy and eye for a deal play a large role in the choices we make. All of the hardware picks in this guide are done after carefully weighing the price to performance ratio of each component, then seeing if they meet our budget limit of $2500. This guide is your median between our Value Buyer's Guide with only a $1000 limit, and our Extreme Buyer's Guide with a massive $4000 budget.

The purpose behind this guide is to give you a general idea of what kind of gaming PC is possible with a budget of $2500. While the individual components we choose are excellent, we take a look at the larger picture, and decide which pieces meld together the best to form the highest-performing, feature-rich gaming PC possible. We recommend configurations for both the Intel and AMD sides of the spectrum, and are not here to promote one platform over the other.

This past month has seen the introduction of a lot of new high performance hardware. Intel and AMD both announced new processors, there are some new motherboards for AMD's Athlon 64 line, and Creative released a new line of soundcards. Thankfully, we were able to incorporate much of this new hardware into our guide, making this edition a noted upgrade compared to last month.

Case: Lian Li PC-65 w/ Antec TruePower 480W PSU

Current Cost: $199
Months on list: New
Price Change: N/A

We like to list the case and power supply first in this guide because both should be at the top of your list of items when building a new PC. The case will stay with you longer than any other single internal hardware purchase, and can dictate which upgrades you can, and cannot do, in the future. Be sure to choose a case that fits your size requirements and is both aesthetically pleasing, as well as functional.

Lian Li, Cooler Master, and Antec are our favorite case manufacturers, and you certainly can't go wrong with choosing any of them. We will still recommend the excellent aluminum Lian Li PC-65 again this month as it is among our favorite cases to work with, and very pleasing to the eye. Currently, the case can be had at various online retailers for about $113.

As our case did not come with a power supply we opted for something that would be able to power each and every component we could throw at it, especially with the inclusion of the Athlon 64 processor into this month's machine. The Antec TruePower 480W power supply fits the bill. It's imperative that one chooses a power supply from a reputable brand as bargain units often have ridiculously high output claims that they simply can't measure up to.