Thanks AVADirect

At the heart of our system sits an Intel Core i7-2600K which has been given to us by our good friends at AVADirect. This CPU has become a fan favorite of mine and a fan favorite of all overclockers out there. The ease of overclocking by doing nothing more than bumping the multiplier up means that 1GHz overclocks are seen with almost no effort.

Really, Intel should've called it the Intel Core i7-bangforbuck, because it's just excellent value when you consider the amount of performance you're able to achieve from it. It's the centerpiece of our system in which everything else will revolve around.

Thanks GIGABYTE

Behind every good man, they say there's a good woman. Well, behind every good CPU there's also a good motherboard, and our friends at GIGABYTE hooked us up with the P67A-UD7.

I'm not really a motherboard guy, but I have had the luxury of checking a few new boards out lately and I have to say this is just a swish looking motherboard. While GIGABYTE has chosen to skip the fancy new BIOS interface we see on some other P67 boards, what we're seeing is nice and familiar which makes overclocking easy.

The black PCB, though, is what makes it stand out and with those few bits of gold here and there on the heatsink we've got ourselves a good looking motherboard that performs exceptionally well.