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-dampening features.

Processor
The Core i7-860 may cost 90 bucks more than the Utility Player's Core i5-750, but it has two major advantages: a higher clock speed and Hyper-Threading. Thanks to Windows 7 and its SMT parking in particular, HT can help quite considerably in certain tasks without compromising performance in others. We've found that Core i7 CPUs are considerably faster than the i5-750 with 7-Zip compression, two-pass video encoding, and 3D rendering, all of which take advantage of the i7's support for additional threads. We think that's worth the premium in a $1,300 system.

Motherboard
Our chosen processor 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 controllers, 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 system voltages.

What about 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 doesn't typically share the Econobox's memory recommendation. However, the reality here is that four gigs of DDR3-1333 RAM should be plenty even for multitasking-crazy overclockers.

Graphics
Again, the Radeon HD 5850 outpaces all older and cheaper GPUs, so it's an easy pick. We found that this GPU is generally fast enough to run games at 2560x1600 with antialiasing cranked up, in fact. As icing on the cake, the 5850 consumes the same amount of power as the Radeon HD 5770 at idle, generates almost the same amount of noise under load, and doesn't appear to run any hotter.

What we said about availability on the previous page still holds, however. If you can't find this Asus model in stock, you can always hit our price search engine to find a different one.

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.

Stepping up to this drive's 1TB sibling wouldn't add that much to the Sweeter Spot's total price, but the 1TB Black is quite a bit louder than other drives. Since practically everything else in this build is quiet (or can be cooled quietly), we'd rather stick with the 640GB model.

As for our optical storage, the 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 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 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 user 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 snake 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.