I purchased this system almost exactly to spec. I substituted:
Patriot PC3-12800 1600 MHz
Diamond Radeon HD 4890
Antec P-193 case

Everything came together easily enough and I had Windows 7 up and running in 4 hours from start.

The problem I'm having is with the CPU fan. It's running at high most of the time. Not all of the time, mind you, but most of the time.
Example 1: Fan running low. Launch Lord of the Rings Online. Fan kicks into high. End the game but fan remains high.

Example 2: Fan running low after first power-up for the day. Runs low for 1 hour. Tell Windows 7 to restart and on the way down the fan kicks into high and remains high through power off and then on restart and into windows 7 loaded. 2 hours later fan still on high.

Any ideas?

I'm building a machine with the mboard, cpu and memory of the Sweeter Spot. I tried to install Windows 7 (32 bit). The machine would not reboot to finish the install, but turn off. All I could do was boot into safe mode, which wasn't usefull. I have since installed an old copy of XP pro. Any ideas why Win7 doesn't install?

Haven't built a PC in a LOOONG time, so I went with the exact parts list recommended for the Sweeter Spot (sans soundcard) to get back in the game. Long story short, and knock on wood, but all the parts came together great and the computer is running like the wind now. Super fast, i7/6gb DDR3/Radeon 4890 combo can handle most gaming tasks well (don't do much online FPS gaming myself). Only comment for relative novices like me is that installing the power supply and connecting all the components for the Antec case can be a bit tricky due to the design of the "thermal zone" separator and the fact that the cables come out mere inches from the bottom fan.

The Pocket Swiss Army Knife
Incidentally, our search for a Mini-ITX AMD motherboard with similar perks proved fruitless. The only contenders we found lacked a PCI Express x16 slot—no good if you want to turn this system into a tiny gaming box.

You must have missed the J&W MINIX 780G-SP128MB - http://www.jwele.com/motherboard_detail.php?419

It pretty much matches the Zotac Intel board, at a slightly cheaper price - and is an AMD board.

I gotta criticize the x4-940. It's DDR2 only. I can't agree with DDR2 for a new system build at this point.

But opinions are like elbows....

Do you guys actually try all the products you recommend?

I just bought myself a daskeyboard and it is going back because of the tricks it attempts to play in order to increase the number of keys available for rollover. The short of it is that the USB specs only provide for a maximum of 6-key rollover. The daskeyboard claims 12-key rollover, which they get by having an internal USB hub and faking two separate keyboards.

Well, this innovative twist is not without its problems, mainly, that it can interfere with USB in your whole system! When I plugged mine in, my Dell monitor hub turned into an "unknown USB device". On top of that, I could no longer plug in external USB hard drives! They provide a USB Y cable so that you can plug the daskeyboard into two USB ports if necessary. That is a very odd thing in and of itself, but it is probably related to the whole mess of their trick to get 12-key rollover.

I talked with their tech support, which is odd in its own right as the only way to communicate with them is through a ticket system and there's no way to see what kinds of problems other users are having. They were of no help in the end so it is going back.

I'm going to be checking out the Steelseries 7G (http://www.steelseries.com/us/products/keyboards/7g/information) next. Wish me luck!

One last rant, what is with keyboard manufacturers messing with keyboard layouts? As a gamer and professional programmer, I really do not need my home key cluster messed with!

Is there any reason you jumped to the Core i7-950 for the Double Stuff Workstation instead of sticking with the i7-920?

Another article another time for the fans to repeat their desired changes.
Ditch the soundcard - pointless unless you have REALLY good speakers.
Otherwise money far far better spent on quality speakers than a quality card and mediocre speakers.

Windows 7 64bit (and 32, ugh) are 'free' until July - do not for the love of god pay for Windows Vista, please - ugh!

Glad to see WD recommended, have to agree - have snuck back 4 Seagates into my drive family on a gamble ($$$ / space ratio was insane, had to try) - failure, avoid Seagate, avoid.

Antec P183 over P182, I quite like the P183
Asus over Gigabyte for the boards, period - I don't like Gigabyte, some of you do - good for you, I'd avoid them like the plague.

SSD's being too small.
2 comments.
We told you so.
also
Learn how to manage data better :( these are your only options, pay a heap or manage data carefully.
Still a great little writeup, man I want an i7 so bad :(

Pity the 4770 is so hard to find (and so priced at a premium) as that would be a great choice in the Sugo - low power dual slot with great performance. I would be uncomfortable putting something as hot/power hungry as the 4850 in the Sugo.

In my ITX build, I wanted a much smaller case (low profile, pico psu) than the Sugo so I chose a 2.5" notebook drive (the TR editor's choice WD 500GB) instead of a 3.5" drive.
p.s. why is WD the best choice in every segment of the consumer hard drive market?

edit: BTW - thanks for a great guide! The econobox is very nice.

That's it !!!
No Bechmarks ?

That said, new products are looming on the horizon,

Yeah, the next six months are going to be one of the more interesting spans like that we've had in several years -- Lynnfield, a new generation of GPUs (at least from AMD), and a new version of Windows. On top of that, there's a new generation of NAND (34nm from Intel/Micron, and 32nm from Samsung etc) looming. In fact Intel's new SSDs may be coming sooner rather than later. It'll be interesting to watch the System Guide over the next year or so as SSDs start to sneak in at the high end and filter down (at least as an alternative or adjunct to the conventional HD).

For the Swiss Army Knife you've made a bit of a mistake I believe limiting it to single-slot graphics card. That case has two expansion slots (look at your pictures ;)) and can use double-slot cards. The length limitation still applies and you want to use at most a 4850 or 9" GTS 250 according to Silverstone because of the PSU.

I'd also be curious to know how much height there is between a motherboard and the bottom of the PSU in that case. It's just begging for a mini Ninja for CPU cooling if it fits.

You should consider the Coolermaster 690 or 690 NV for your next article. It's priced cheaper than the P182 but has many of the features of the $179 Coolermaster case mentioned. Five or six 120mm fan mounts (some with dust filters), toolless HDD tray system w/tranverse mounting, toolless 5.25 bays, PSU at the bottom, fits large heatsinks, most of the same I/O ports on the top, etc. I have a 690NV and am extremely happy with it. For ~$80 it seems to beat the $120-150 Antecs based on my needs.

Hmmm. I was planning on getting DDR3-2000 (3x2GB) for my next build. I expected to see it somewhere here.

X-25m for main OS and apps all the way. 80gigs is plenty. Anything big goes to NAS.

Man, that Econobox is nice.

Anyone care to offer other ITX case recommendations? The SG05 is a great choice if you're using discrete graphics, but if all you need is the IGP for a utility machine, you could go with something much smaller. Unfortunately, most of the ITX cases I've looked at online appear to be cheaply made (though not cheaply priced), badly designed, and/or simply ugly.

After reading a bunch of reviews from a bunch of sites I think its a fair comparison between Phenom II X4 955 and the Core 2 9650. The Phenom 955 is overall faster than the Core 2 9550.

Anyone have a Small Form Factor case to recommend for the econobox? The smaller and nonshuttleness, the better.

Originally I decided to wait until an x64 Windows OS was viable. Having more than 4GB RAM was just too tempting a paradigm shift to buy new beforehand.

Now, we have the viable x64 Windows... thing is, there are some tempting improvements right around the corner....

- DX11 - Requires hardware support that current cards don't have.
- USB3.0 - Our friend the Universal Serial Bus doesn't get an upgrade all that often.
- SATA 6Gbps - Another example of connections that don't upgrade that often. And yes, it's technically here now.

I know I can get controller cards for the connectors, but if I can have it built in, why bother? It's easy to get into the waiting game for that next chipset, or that next revision, but I think these are worth holding off a few months for.

I would have put a recommendation in for the Dell Ultrasharp 2209WA monitor, with its 8-bit E-IPS panel for only $200 to $260, depending on the phase of the moon. I'm really pleased with mine.

Hooray Cookies!

Edit: After actually reading through the guide, I'm surprised how much ATI(AMD I guess) has dominated the lower price ranges. Their cards are really in the value spot this generation.

I agree with the comments below, Windows 7 RC1 is what I'm running until October.

I also like the choice of the i950 in the double-stuff. I don't think a chip over a thousand dollars is worth it, either.

Great guide, and its probably going to be the last one of this generation so eat up folks!

Does that Antec P182 case fit a GTX295 single PCB?

I'm running Windows 7 RC1, as per my sig, and I'd have to agree that it's Microsoft's best OS yet. You probably were better off mentioning it right at the top of the OS section. I've also had amazingly little pain migrating to W7 (x64) from Vista. And W7 is _more_ stable than Vista (which was more stable than XP SP2 on my setup).

A case I'd like to throw out there for anyone building the Sweeter Spot or Double-Stuff systems is the Cooler Master HAF 932. I helped a friend build a system a couple of weeks back, and this was the case he chose. Awesome airflow, and significantly quieter than you'd expect for all those (HUGE!) fans. I also found it amazingly pleasant to work in, even without a removable motherboard tray. For those of you who're skeptical about this, I have a Silverstone TJ-09, which _does_ have a removable tray, and the HAF was _still_ better to work with than that (already very good) case. Tool-free hard-drive and optical drive installation FTW! Plus, many cutouts for routing all cabling behind the motherboard tray, and extra depth back there to make sure you're not crowding the right-side panel when you do so.

We also used the Noctua NH-U12P in that (Core i7 920) build, and CPU temperatures were 26-28 degrees Celsius at idle, and 48-50 at 100% CPU load, after a day+ of burn-in. I'd expect those temperatures to drop a bit more as the thermal paste cures further. Granted, this PC is in a relatively cool basement, but still excellent results. We used the same 6x2 OCZ DDR3-1600 config outlined in the Double-stuff with a P6T Deluxe V2, and had zero installation issues (again with Windows 7 RC1).

I also second the WD recommendations. Caviar Blacks are absolutely awesome drives, and the V-Raptor is still a really nice compromise if you don't want to go SSD. I'd really wait for Intel's X-25M successor (and/or) the next wave of Indilinx-based drives (and Windows 7 to release) before pulling the SSD trigger, especially if you're still not happy about the current state of TRIM support, and current firmware solutions for the used-drive performance penalties. Intel's done a decent job with their latest firmware, though.

One more thing for anyone thinking about going Core i7 is that the 920 is likely to go away pretty quickly once the Lynnfield's come out, and if you're thinking of building a system to take advantage of all that Core i7 bandwidth, that definitely will change the price equation. For desktop/gaming usage, Lynnfield (and it's advanced turbo mode) will be a better choice, but if you have more workstation needs, then squirreling away a late-run i7 920 may be a good idea.

I imagine there must be millions of people out there with analog photo albums and boxes of VHS and home video 8mm that need/would love to have it all saved into digital format.
It would be a cool thing if TR could spec an "all in one" rig designed just for that purpose.

Huh. Wasn't expecting a system guide. That econobox looks pretty tempting!!

I'm also digging that Swiss Army build. Way neato. Quick question: Are you sure that enclosure will have enough clearance to fit the aftermarket cooler?

on the Utility Player
you could save a little more using the motherboard with SPDIF out
and not have to buy a sound card
though some people might argue against onboard audio, but I do not think the one on this board is a bad option for most people

Looks like a good one, what with it incorporating all the market shifts since April. :)

The addition of an HTPC section is nice as well, but on the monitor side, where's the 2209WA? It would seem to be more or less the best of both worlds, what with it being an IPS screen at TN prices. The only drawbacks are the fact that it and the E-IPS panel type in general only come in 22" and 1680x1050 resolution, which might be a deal breaker for some.

Some thoughts:

The SG05 is such an awesome little case. The power inside a mini ITX machine is just insane. A full blown gaming system can be put into that little sucker with basically no sacrifices except a dedicated sound card. That's why we have awesome external DACs available though.

Really glad to see a change on the heatsink recommendation. A choice much more fitting to the options available on the market today. I would like to see more heatsink reviews coming out of TR.

I think I would still stick with the X-25M for the storage recommendations on the Double-Stuff. The size limitations just don't see like a big deal considering what would really be done on the systems. Having a few of your seldom played games coming off the other drives seems like a very minor nitpick compared to the massive increase in noise the Raptor's will bring.