The Sweeter Spot
Indulgence without excess

The Utility Player might be good enough for many users, but the Sweeter Spot goes the extra mile to bring you more processing power, faster graphics, Blu-ray, and a bigger enclosure with more elaborate noise-reduction features.

Processor
Unlike our last two builds, the Sweeter Spot has actually come down in price since the previous edition of the guide. You can credit the Core i7-860 for that. Not only does this processor have a higher base clock speed, more powerful Turbo Boost capabilities, and lower idle power consumption than our previous pick, the Core i7-920, but it costs almost the same and works with cheaper motherboards and memory kits. What's not to like?

Motherboard
The Core i7-860 would work happily in the Utility Player's motherboard, but our budget lets us spring for something a little nicer here. For an extra $30, Gigabyte's GA-P55-UD4P adds more PCIe slots, FireWire, support for Nvidia SLI multi-GPU setups, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and somewhat beefier cooling. This looks to be a mean overclocker, too: in our labs, we were able to push its base clock from 133MHz to 210MHz without increasing the voltage.

Why not opt for the slightly cheaper MSI P55-GD65 we gave such good marks to in our review? As good a board as that is, it doesn't have as generous a feature set as the GA-P55-UD4P, and it doesn't overclock as well. We'd rather spend $10 more on the Gigabyte board.

Memory
Our high-end config hasn't shared the Econobox's memory recommendation in quite a while. However, the reality here is that four gigs of DDR3-1333 RAM should be plenty even for multitasking-crazy overclockers.

Graphics
With the Radeon HD 4890 now down below 200 bucks, it'd be a shame to set up the Sweeter Spot with anything less. (Again, this card's performance lies in a somewhat different class than that of the 4870 1GB.) We're picking the 4890 over an Nvidia rival because our chosen XFX card has both double-lifetime warranty coverage and great user reviews, and it costs less than the cheapest GeForce GTX 275s or "superclocked" GeForce GTX 260s. That said, we've singled out an Nvidia alternative on the next page.

Storage
We used to recommend a dual-drive setup for this build. However, overwhelmed by the wealth of hard-drive choices in this price range, we chose to recommend a straightforward single-drive config and leave more exotic suggestions to the alternatives page. The 640GB Western Digital Caviar Black is still an excellent drive, and we expect most users will find its storage capacity sufficient unless they need to store hundreds of gigs of, ahem, Linux ISOs.

As for our optical storage, the same dual-drive solution we suggested on the previous page should also work great here: Samsung's SH-S223B will be in charge of DVD burning, while Lite-On's iHOS104-08 will take care of Blu-ray playback.

Audio
If we had room for Asus' Xonar DX in the $800 Utility Player, we certainly have a place for it here. 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, this is easily the best mid-range sound card on the market today.

Power Supply
A high-end Core i7 system calls for something a little meatier than a case-and-PSU bundle, so we've picked out a Corsair TX650W. This power supply has a single, beefy 12V rail, plenty of connectors, 80% or greater rated efficiency, active power factor correction, a single 120-mm fan for cooling, and, best of all, a five-year warranty. We weren't all that thrilled with load noise levels when we tested this unit's 750W big brother last year, but reviews around the web suggest that the TX650W is quieter. And the Newegg reviews are excellent, which is usually a good sign.

Enclosure
Antec's P183 case isn't particularly cheap, but it has many upsides, including composite panels, adjustable-speed 120-mm 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.