Building The Dream PC

Ordinarily, with the heart of the holiday buying season just weeks away, system builders wouldn't just be dreaming of such systems. They'd be ordering the parts and assembling those PCs in volume. But these aren't ordinary times. In the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, folks are tightening their belts and putting off big-ticket purchases. People are thinking about getting through the next few months financially intact and employed—a state of affairs that's less likely to come about if you're spending several hours a day playing video games.

So, for many buyers out there, low-end PC price points suddenly look mainstream, midlevel systems look high-end and those enthusiast rigs we all want are now completely out of reach.

Here's a look at those "dream machines"—the very best, most expensive desktop processors and platforms currently on the market—and also some of the better bargains available for those forced to sacrifice just a little bit of performance to build their "Dream PC—Hard Times Edition."

Enter Nehalem Kick-starting the CPU conversation is, naturally, a look at the latest from Intel, Santa Clara, Calif. The top desktop processor from the chip market leader is its Core 2 Extreme QX9775. This 3.2-GHz, 150-watt monster boasts 12 MB of L2 cache and a 1,600-MHz front side bus—but it'll also set you back $1,499 per the vendor's list price, or $1,549 purchased on NewEgg.com.

If that's pretty mind-boggling, the really serious gamers, no doubt, want to go even further and drop a Xeon server processor alongside a Core 2 Duo Extreme on Intel's out-of-control "Skulltrail" Extended ATX Motherboard. But at about $610 for the Skulltrail board alone, what even hard-core enthusiasts want for Christmas may not be what they get this year.

The good news is that Intel's new Core i7 chips are in the hands of OEMs, distributors and the white box channel. These quad-core processors boast a new micro-architecture, code-named Nehalem, that integrates the memory controller, jacks the memory up to DDR3 and introduces a "native" core architecture that features independent power supplies for better power management and less energy leakage.

The best part about the new Core i7 processors? The top part, the Intel Core i7-965 Extreme Edition, is just $999—a $500 savings over the top Core 2 Extreme quad-core in the older desktop lineup. The even better part? Brian Sheinberg, associate technical editor of the CRN Test Center, rates the 3.2-GHz Core i7-965 Extreme Edition as the best desktop chip he's ever benchmarked.

"Intel's next-generation Nehalem processor lineup is so powerful that it simply destroys previous CPU benchmarks," Sheinberg wrote in early November after reviewing the three currently available Core i7 chips.

Of course, there's always a rub.

With regards to the Core i7, Intel is clearly ready with its new product, but the components ecosystem around Nehalem might ramp up more slowly. Intel launched its first Nehalem products with motherboard platforms built around its new X58 chipset, an I/O hub that supports the new QuickPath interface used by Nehalem-class processors.

Apparently, graphics processing on the X58 is dependent on enabling SLI on the chipset through a certification process with Nvidia, Santa Clara, Calif. What's not obvious is how quickly board makers are clearing their certs with the graphics chip maker in the early days of Core i7.

Memory supplies are another potential issue. Nehalem platforms won't need an onboard memory interface, and the architecture introduces triple-channel DDR3 memory on the Core i7. Brian Corn of Intel partner Source Code, Waltham, Mass., said about a week before the official Core i7 launch on Nov. 14 that his company was having some trouble getting products from the memory manufacturers that support running three DIMMs at 1,600MHz on the Nehalem platform.

It may also take some time for software developers to fully embrace DDR3, said Philip Pokorny, chief architect at Penguin Computing Inc., San Francisco.

"Developers are going to have trouble with DDR3, because Intel is introducing a new prime number to write to, and the 'power of three' is harder than the 'power of two.' Writing for three memory channels is tough for a software engineer," Pokorny said.

Intel's Steve Dallman said some of those concerns might have been true at one time, but that the components vendors are quickly catching up to Nehalem's platform requirements.

"I'm really glad you didn't ask me six months ago," said Dallman, Intel's worldwide reseller channel chief, when queried directly in early November about component availability in the first weeks after the Core i7 launch. "But today I'm feeling really good. Six months ago, we were really worried about chassis availability and who would get certification on the X58 chipset.

"But now we're in excellent shape with the mainstream chassis guys. The board is incredibly solid from our perspective and has been shipping into the channel for a week or two. After the chassis, the boards and the CPUs, it's the regular mix and match on hard disks, etc.," Dallman said. "And look, memory is out there and available," he added. "Luckily, we put DDR3 memory on our earlier Extreme products. Right now, per the meeting I went to yesterday, we don't have any major gaps in components."

Next: The Road To Shanghai The Road To Shanghai The current quad-core CPU lineup from AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif., is another option for custom system builders. While AMD's top-of-the-line Phenom desktop processor, the 2.6-GHz X4 9950, doesn't have the straight-ahead horsepower of Intel's top Core 2 Quad and new Core i7 products, it's very affordable, at about $185 for the Black Edition.

A big advantage in going with Phenom on the CPU includes the chance to tap into the integrated graphics power of AMD's 7-Series chipset family for visual pop that is at least a match for anything Intel puts out. Pending Nvidia's full transition to the 55nm process that AMD broke ground on, and the wider adoption of Nvidia's new 9-Series motherboard GPUs, it's arguable that AMD owns the performance crown.

So consider this—you'd probably pay about $1,455 total for an AMD 790FX motherboard from DFI, Hsi-Chih City, Taiwan, the Phenom X4 9950 and a pair of ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics cards by Sapphire, Hong Kong. Compare that to the combined price of a Striker II Extreme Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI board from Asus, Taipei, Taiwan, Intel's 2.66-GHz Core 2 Quad 9400 and one of Nvidia's GeForce GTX 280 SSC Edition cards—you're one graphics card and 3 MB short of the AMD-ATI package, and you're already in for $1,155.

AMD, already shipping its new 45 nm "Shanghai" server processors, is expected to follow up with 45 nm desktop processors in the first quarter of 2009, matching Intel's current process technology. That transition, along with Intel's move to the native multicore architecture AMD has embraced, means that benchmarking the two companies' products against each other will be more straightforward than it's been in years.

"We're really going to be able to finally have an apples-to-apples comparison on performance. If you can have both the performance and the power consumption crown, that'll be the crown jewel," said Source Code's Corn.

If Nvidia appears to get the short end of the stick in this analysis, don't feel too bad. The graphic chip maker's combative CEO Jen-Hsun Huang certainly isn't joining any pity parties, admitting freely on a recent call with financial analysts that Nvidia got caught "flat-footed" by AMD's new ATI products. Nvidia lost both market and performance share to AMD this summer, but Jen-Hsun pledged that Nvidia would soon regain lost share with its continued transition to 55 nm and a "fabulous new processor" planned for 2009.

So where does all this leave high-end system builders? As always, it's wise to keep looking for bargains on components. But if you can knock off some serious dollars on overall system cost thanks to products like Intel's exciting Core i7 processors or AMD's enticing integration of CPU and GPU performance, maybe—just maybe—you can convince some customers to pony up $730 for the Corsair Dominator memory and a terabyte or two of hard drive.

At a cool $3,500, that 30-inch Samsung XL30 Black LED-backlit display might be tougher to justify.