The Sweet Spot
Excess—with a healthy dose of prudence

We've crammed some impressive hardware into our Grand Experiment, but the $1,000 target price still forces us to make some compromises. The Sweet Spot lets us allocate an extra $500 to polish out those few rough edges and chuck in a few extras. At the same time, we've made sure to avoid wasting cash on unnecessary items, so the Sweet Spot still delivers great value for the money.

Processor
The Sweet Spot's more generous budget lets us go a step up the Core 2 Quad ladder and snatch the Q9550. We think this is a good upgrade: for a $55 premium, you get a speed boost from 2.66GHz to 2.83GHz and a cache size increase from 6MB to 12MB. The Q9550's higher multiplier should allow overclockers to hit higher core clocks with slower front-side bus speeds, too, although our recommended motherboard should have more than enough FSB headroom.

Motherboard
The Grand Experiment's Gigabyte P45 motherboard doubles 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 Kingston 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
Why are we recommending a pair of $85 hard drives instead of a single high-end model? For one, 750GB and 1TB hard drives can't match the cost per gigabyte of Western Digital's Caviar SE16 640GB. On top of that, we've yet to encounter a higher-capacity model that brings quite the same mix of great performance, low noise levels, and overwhelmingly positive user reviews. Finally, picking two identical drives like these opens the door to RAID—more specifically, a mirrored RAID 1 array.

RAID 1 arrays can improve read performance, and their redundancy allows systems to survive single drive failures without data loss. Having a real-time mirror of the contents of your system's hard drive can save loads of time when a drive fails—so much so that at least two of TR's editors run RAID 1 in their primary desktops. If you value storage capacity over redundancy, though, nothing stops you from running these two drives independently or combining them in a 1.28TB JBOD array (or an even riskier but potentially faster RAID 0 setup).

On the optical side of things, we have enough moolah to outfit the Sweet Spot with a Blu-ray reader and DVD burner combo drive by default. LG's GGC-H20L can actually read both Blu-ray and HD DVD discs, and it has encouragingly positive user reviews on Newegg. Even if you don't care too much about high-definition movies, the drive's relatively speedy DVD burning capabilities should keep you happy.

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—and a great match for the Sweet Spot.

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 retained that crown in our latest PSU comparo. With enough output capacity for any quad-core system with one or two fast GPUs, a five-year warranty, remarkably low noise levels, very clean power delivery, high efficiency, and dual 8-pin PCI Express power connectors, and the Silencer certainly looks perfect for the Sweet Spot. Just a word of warning: 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 delightfully low noise levels given the Sweet Spot's relatively quiet components.