The Sweeter Spot
Indulgence without excess

The $1,500 Sweet Spot from system guides of old has gone, leaving its place to the $1,200 Sweeter Spot. Think of the Sweet Spot as brown sugar and the Sweeter Spot as white sugar. All we've done is cut the indulgent molasses, making the Sweeter Spot lighter on your wallet while keeping its payload of essential enthusiast hardware.

Processor
With the Utility Player, we provided a choice between fast dual-core and slower quad-core processors. You don't face the same dilemma here. The Core 2 Quad Q9400's 2.66GHz clock speed and Penryn cores should allow it to tailgate higher-clocked Core 2 Duos in single-threaded apps, and thanks to its four cores, it can zoom well ahead with multithreaded workloads. We think that versatility makes the Q9400 a pretty sweet deal for just $270. Some of you may disagree and prefer a slightly faster model with more cache, though, in which case you'll want to check out our alternatives section on the next page.

Motherboard
The Utility Player's Gigabyte P45 motherboard doubles as our recommendation for the Sweeter Spot. Considering the GA-EP45-UD3P's features and price, we see no reason to outfit the Sweeter Spot with anything more extravagant—especially since we're trying to stay reasonable here.

Memory
We're also going with the same 4GB Kingston DDR2-800 kit we used in the Utility Player, 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 other upgrades.

Again, you'll want to run a 64-bit operating system to take full advantage of 4GB of RAM. Skip ahead to the second-to-last page of the guide for more in-depth OS advice.

Graphics
We're shying away from multi-GPU setups for the Sweeter Spot's primary config, since today's $300 graphics cards perform beautifully even on big 24" monitors with the detail turned up. Our recent analysis of the $300 GeForce GTX 260 "Reloaded" and Radeon HD 4870 1GB ended in a virtual tie, but when forced to choose here, we've decided to go with the GeForce. It's not that the Nvidia card is faster (the two offerings are very closely matched); we just think the GeForce is more compelling for other reasons.

Nvidia has forged a close relationship with many game developers through its "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program and other initiatives. Often, lately, new releases have run better on Nvidia GPUs. The GTX 260 Reloaded also draws less power than the 4870 1GB, which is less heat to be dissipated. The difference doesn't amount to much under load, but we measured a 30W gap between the two cards at idle. (That's at least two of those swirly light bulbs.) We could also make a case for Nvidia's PhysX tech, but the list of consumer apps and games that support it is very short indeed right now.

The Zotac card we recommend has additional upsides over other GTX 260 Reloaded variants,including higher clocks: 649MHz core, 1404MHz shader, and 1053MHz memory speeds (up from the default 576/1242/999MHz). Also, this card comes bundled with Race Driver: GRID, and Zotac covers it with a lifetime warranty. Well, technically, the warranty coverage drops down to two years if you don't register within 30 days of purchase, but that's not a bad deal either way.

As we noted in our review, the choice between this new GeForce GTX 260 with 216 SPs and the Radeon HD 4870 1GB is an exceptionally close one that may boil down to bundled extras or your personal preference. See our alternatives section for the other side of the story.

Storage
Our storage recommendation might seem odd, but we find a pair of 640GB WD Caviar Blacks more compelling than a single, higher-capacity drive. You'd have to pay well over $85 to get 750GB or 1TB hard drives with the same mix of great performance, long warranty coverage, and low noise levels. Also, 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).

We're leaving the Blu-ray drive from our Utility Player alternatives out of the primary config here, opting instead for Samsung's SH-S223Q. After all, but we're striving to keep the Sweeter Spot relatively affordable, and we think most folks will be happy with just a DVD burner.

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 Sweeter Spot.

Power Supply
Because we picked a more upscale enclosure for this system, we had to go hunting for a separate power supply. We've actually given the Sweeter Spot a slight downgrade and picked Antec's NeoPower 500W this time around. The price of the 550W model we chose last time has inexplicably doubled, and we think a 500W rating is still plenty for a machine like this—as long as it comes from a quality manufacturer, that is. We singled out the NeoPower 550W for a TR Recommended award, so we expect the 500W unit to be a solid performer, too.

If you have lofty upgrade plans and find the 500W ceiling too low, check out our alternatives for a fancier (but also pricier) power supply recommendation.

Enclosure
Antec's P182 case isn't particularly cheap, but it has many upsides, including composite panels, adjustable-speed 120mm fans, partitioned cooling zones, and a cable management system that lets you run cables behind the motherboard tray. The cooling design and composite panels in particular should enable delightfully low noise levels given the Sweeter Spot's relatively quiet components.