The Grand Experiment is a solid system that should be able to handle a little bit of everything, but its specs aren't exactly drool-inducing. For that, we have our high-end build, a machine that avoids hefty price premiums while packing enough hardware to make you the envy of the next LAN party.

Processor
The Sweet Spot's budget is more generous than that of the Grand Experiment, allowing us to spring for a Core 2 Quad Q9300. Four 45nm Penryn cores clocked at 2.5GHz not only deliver exceptional performance with multithreaded workloads, they're also fast enough on their own to remain competitive in single-threaded tasks.

Motherboard
For obvious reasons, there's no need to support SLI here anymore, so the Grand Experiment's Gigabyte P45 motherboard can double as our recommendation for the Sweet Spot. Considering the GA-EP45-DS3R's features, overclocking potential, and price, we see no reason to outfit the Sweet Spot with anything more extravagant.

Memory
We're also going with the same 4GB Mushkin DDR2-800 kit we used in the Grand Experiment, largely because tricked-out modules rated for operation at higher speeds and tighter timings don't deliver enough of a performance advantage to justify their associated price premiums. If you have extra cash to burn, you'll see greater returns from upgrading other system components.

Again, you'll want to run a 64-bit operating system to take full advantage of 4GB of RAM. More detailed operating system analysis is available on the second-to-last page of the guide.

Graphics
AMD has become the undisputed king of the mid-range graphics market thanks to its new Radeon HD 4800 cards, but we were a little torn on exactly which configuration to recommend for the Sweet Spot. Our budget allows for dual Radeon HD 4850s running in CrossFire, and as we've seen, such a configuration offers phenomenal performance. That said, a closer look at the actual test scores shows that the Radeon HD 4870 is well past the "fast enough" mark in most current games—even at very high resolutions and detail levels.

Since multi-GPU configs take more room, generate more heat, and don't always perform up to their potential in new games as well as single cards, we settled on the 4870 for the Sweet Spot's primary config. If you'd rather have a pair of 4850s, check out our alternatives section on the following page.

Storage
Western Digital's Caviar SE16 640GB may be a little on the cheap side for this system, but its mix of excellent performance, low noise levels, and overwhelmingly positive user reviews leaves little to be desired. Besides, 640GB isn't exactly tight unless you need to store oodles of high-definition videos (or Linux ISOs). If you thirst for more gigabytes, check out our alternatives section on the following page.

We're sticking with the Samsung SH-S203N on the optical side because more expensive SATA DVD burners don't have anything particularly worthwhile to offer.

Audio
With fantastic sound quality, support for real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding, a PCI Express interface, and the ability to emulate the latest EAX effects, the Asus Xonar DX is easily the best mid-range sound card on the market.

Power Supply
All-in-one case and power supply bundles complement cheaper systems well enough, but the Sweet Spot has both an ample budget and power-hungrier components, so discrete solutions make more sense here.

PC Power & Cooling's Silencer 750 won an Editor's Choice Award in our enthusiast power supply round-up, and its output capacity makes it a good companion for any quad-core system with one or two fast GPUs. Chuck in a five-year warranty, remarkably low noise levels, very clean power delivery, efficiency that puts comparable offerings to shame, and dual 8-pin PCI Express power connectors, and the Silencer certainly looks perfect for the Sweet Spot. Just a word of warning, though: this PSU is quite long, and it's somewhat of a tight fit in our recommended case.

Enclosure
Antec's P182 case has the same upside-down design, composite panels, adjustable-speed 120mm fans, and partitioned cooling zones as the older Antec P180. However, this new model improves greatly upon its predecessor's biggest flaw: cable management. Unlike the P180, the P182 is designed to run cables behind the motherboard tray, helping to avoid tangled messes. And, of course, the case's design and composite panels should enable prodigiously low noise levels given the Sweet Spot's relatively quiet components.