The Utility Player
Value without major compromises

For an extra fistful of Franklins, the Utility Player gives us more of everything—processing power, graphics performance, memory, storage capacity—you name it—while remaining tantalizingly affordable.

Processor
We ran the numbers on the Core i5-750 in our latest processor roundup's value section. When we accounted for the price of a full system much like the Utility Player, this CPU came out on top of both our performance-per-dollar and power-efficiency-per-dollar rankings. With four Nehalem cores, a 95W thermal envelope, and a sub-$200 price tag, it's no wonder the Core i5-750 does so well. What better choice for this build?

Motherboard
Our Utility Player keeps its shiny USB 3.0 and 6Gbps Serial ATA ports, but they're now coming out of a slightly different motherboard. In March, we picked Gigabyte's GA-P55A-UD3 over Asus' P7P55D-E because we felt the latter's extras weren't worth a $25 premium. Well, today, the Asus board only costs $10 more than the alternative—and since it adds external Serial ATA and FireWire to the mix, we feel it's now the better deal of the two.

Both contestants otherwise have very similar feature sets: two of each next-gen I/O port, six 300MB/s Serial ATA ports, dual physical PCI Express x16 slots (one of which has only four lanes of PCIe connectivity), CrossFire certification, and heatsinks covering the processor's power-regulation circuitry. The Asus board trades one 32-bit PCI slot for a PCIe x1, however.

Memory
This build's budget lets us include 4GB of Crucial DDR3-1333 RAM in our primary config despite recent memory price increases. The Utility Player would look a little lopsided with a $200 CPU, $160 graphics card, and just two gigs of RAM, after all. Just make sure you install a 64-bit operating system, or you won't be able to make use of all this RAM easily.

Graphics
We're not going to re-hash what we wrote about this card on the last page, but suffice it to say the Radeon HD 5770 can run most games at 1920x1200 with antialiasing, at the same time delivering great image quality, low power consumption, and relatively low noise levels. Now that the old Radeon HD 4870 1GB has all but disappeared from e-tail listings, the 5770 also has virtually no competition in this price range. Nvidia's GeForce GTS 250 1GB might count if it weren't an older, slower, and power-hungrier DirectX 10 product.

There's plenty of room to go up from the 5770, of course. If you'd like more performance and have some wiggle room in your budget, see the next page.

Storage
For what seems like ages, we recommended 640GB Western Digital hard drives across our three cheapest builds. We prolonged this tradition for lack of a 1TB drive with the same mix of great performance and low noise levels. In light of today's prices and the release of WD's 1TB Caviar Black with 6Gbps SATA, however, we've decided to compromise a little bit. The new 1TB drive might have relatively high seek noise levels, but it also has more storage capacity, better performance, the same five-year warranty as the Econobox's 640GB Caviar Black, and roughly the same cost per gigabyte.

For a cheaper, potentially quieter 1TB alternative, see the next page.

We're sticking with the Samsung SH-S223L as our optical drive. DVD burners have become commodity items, so we're not terribly inclined to get something fancier just because of our more generous budget.

Audio
Our inclusion of a discrete sound card in previous Utility Player builds elicited some very polarized responses, with some folks praising the Asus Xonar DX for its superior analog sound quality and others labeling it a waste of money. This time, we've stuck with onboard audio in our primary config—not because we now side with the latter camp, but because price increases on other components (namely memory) mean the Xonar would push us well over budget, making it much tougher to justify.

This decision involved a fair amount of hand-wringing. However, we reckon onboard audio will sound okay—not great, just okay—to folks with cheap headphones or speakers. Good enough for gaming, YouTube, and listening to MP3s, certainly. If you're running a receiver or speakers with a digital input, the burden of good digital-to-analog conversion will rest with those components rather than the motherboard.

Should you happen to have a halfway decent analog audio device and the slightest amount of concern about sound quality, though, a good sound card will make a very real, palpable difference. Bass will be less boomy, mids will sound far more detailed, and highs won't chirp away louder than they should. Everything will sound distinctly, unmistakably more natural. If better analog sound is worth an extra $90 to you, then skip over to our alternatives page.

Enclosure and power
The Antec Sonata III costs more than the NSK 4482 we selected for the Econobox, but it has several big advantages, including a beefy 500W power supply with an 80% efficiency rating, a clean layout with sideways-mounted hard drive bays, and a host of noise reduction features. Antec even slaps an eSATA port on the Sonata's front bezel, in case you want to be able to plug in a fast external hard drive without crawling behind the system.