Introduction

It has been over a year since we published our first Performance PC article , actually tipping just over 14 months if you want to get a little bit more precise about it. So much in computing technology has changed since the last time we gathered all the hottest hardware around which we could get our hands on and put it all together and saw just what kind of results we could get.

Over the past 14 months plenty of hardware has come through the labs and plenty of advancements have happened. nVidia made a graphics card the enthusiast want, Intel released a new socket and a new FSB to boot, hard drives have got faster and cheaper, 300 watt power supplies aren't enough now and the list continues on.

We could write a Performance PC article every month if we wanted to as something faster is always coming out but what fun is that we ask you. With 14 months gone since our last article we can just stop for a second and look at all the hardware that came...and then went. Some companies tried their hardest over the past 14 months, XGI with their Dual Core graphics cards - sounds good, looks good yet performs badly. ATI tried their hand at the Intel motherboard market and didn't seem to have a lot of success so they moved over to AMD to where they hope to have a bit more luck. nVidia have continued to kick butt in the Athlon chipset arena with the nForce line becoming more and more popular every month.

Now last time we mentioned what was going to be in the system here but this time we will keep you guessing so read on page after page to find out what we used and more importantly why we used it to build one of the quickest most capable overclocked and most expensive computer desktop systems at the time of writing.

If you have already found yourself foaming at the mouth, that's perfectly okay. Our jaws dropped several times during the testing phases of this article. Read on and we'll show you what near on $5,000 USD worth of computer hardware gets you from our recommendations!

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