

powered by

Going into this system guide, we weren’t expecting to make too many dramatic changes. Not much new hardware has come out since we published our last guide in February, right? That’s true to an extent, but there’s been room for more than enough little tweaks and modifications to keep us occupied.

At the low end, our Econobox has now drifted closer to our $500 target price, and we’ve started to recommend a more enthusiast-friendly enclosure in the alternatives. The $850 Utility Player has gained a new motherboard with more ports, connectors, and other little perks than before, as well. At the high end, our Double-Stuff Workstation now has a hexa-core processor almost fast enough to become sentient and start building man-killing humanoid robots.

To keep things even spicier, we’ve thrown together a completely new configuration: a microATX system that favors not low power and low cost, but a mix of strong performance and low noise levels. That build includes a Core i5-750, a Radeon HD 5770, a 1TB hard drive, and some very quiet cooling options, all for about the same price as the Utility Player. Keep reading for all the details.

Rules and regulations

The first thing you should know about this guide is that it’s geared toward helping you select the parts for a home-built PC. If you’re new to building your own systems and want a little extra help, our tutorial on how to build your own PC is a great place to start and a helpful complement to this guide.

Before tackling our recommended systems, we should explain some of the rules and guidelines we used to select components. The guiding philosophy behind our choices was to seek the best bang for the buck. That means we avoided recommending super-cheap parts that are barely capable of performing their jobs, just as we generally avoided breathtakingly expensive products that carry a hefty price premium for features or performance you probably don’t need. Instead, we looked to that mythical “sweet spot” where price and performance meet up in a pleasant, harmonic convergence. We also sought balance within each system configuration, choosing components that make sense together, so that a fast processor won’t be bottlenecked by a skimpy graphics card or too little system memory, for instance. The end result, we hope, is a series of balanced systems that offer decent performance as configured and provide ample room for future expandability.

We confined our selections to components that are currently available online. Paper launches and preorders don’t count, for obvious reasons. We also tried to stick to $500, $800 and $1200 budgets for our three cheapest desktop systems. Those budgets are loose guidelines rather than hard limits, to allow us some wiggle room for deals that may stretch the budget a little but are too good to resist.

We’ve continued our tradition of basing the guide’s component prices on listings at Newegg. We’ve found that sourcing prices from one large reseller allows us to maintain a more realistic sense of street prices than price search engine listings, which are sometimes artificially low. In the few cases where Newegg doesn’t have an item in stock, we’ll fall back to our trusty price search engine rather than limit our options.

Finally, price wasn’t the top factor in our component choices. Our own experiences with individual components weighed heavily on our decisions, and we’ve provided links to our own reviews of many of the products we’re recommending. We’ve also tried to confine our selections to name-brand rather than generic productsand to manufacturers with solid reputations for reliability. Warranty coverage was an important consideration, as well.

The Econobox

Because speed doesn’t have to cost a fortune As our cheapest build, the Econobox presents an affordable formula for gaming and general use. Rather than picking leftover components from the bottom of the bargain bin, we tried to balance low cost with decent performance and headroom for upgrades, which should result in a surprisingly well-rounded system for the price. Component Item Price Processor AMD Athlon II X4 630 $99.00 Motherboard Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3 $94.99 Memory Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) DDR3-1333 $57.99 Graphics XFX Radeon HD 5670 $94.99 Storage Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB $74.99 Samsung SH-S223L $26.99 Audio Integrated $0 Enclosure Antec NSK 4482 w/380W PSU $79.99 Total Buy this complete system at Newegg $528.94 Processor Little has changed in the Econobox. The value numbers from our latest CPU showdown (and our subsequent blog post) remain quite relevant here, and they still tell us that AMD’s Athlon II X4 630 delivers the most bang for your buck within the Econobox’s budgetno wonder, considering this CPU packs four 2.8GHz cores yet sells for just under $100. Just as in our March guide, we debated including Intel’s Core i3-530 in our list of primary picks. While the i3-530 doesn’t perform quite as well as the Athlon II overall, it has a tighter thermal envelope (73W vs. 95W), better power efficiency, and incredible overclocking potential. Unfortunately, going that route would distend our already stretched budget, so we’ve relegated the Core i3 to the alternatives. Folks who really care about overclocking and power efficiency should look there. Motherboard USB 3.0 and 6Gbps Serial ATA ports have recently flooded the motherboard market. Part of the Econobox’s appeal comes from its low cost, and it turns out you can get next-gen I/O on relatively cheap boards like Gigabyte’s GA-770TA-UD3. USB 3.0 alone promises substantial performance improvements with all manner of external devices, and 6Gbps SATA could make a big difference with future solid-state drives, so not spending the extra $10-15 now seems a little short-sighted. The GA-770TA-UD3 has a nicely rounded set of features, too, with a gaggle of ports (including external SATA and FireWire) plus an 8+2 power-phase design capable of fueling 140W CPUs. This board’s DDR3 memory slots might seem like a downside now that DDR3 has regained its slight price premium over DDR2. Here, too, however, we’re prioritizing future expansion over small, short-term savings. DDR3 is taking over the system memory market, and DDR2 will likely become more expensive as DDR3 demand increases and DDR2 production wanes. That means adding more RAM down the line could be cheaper with DDR3, and you may be able to re-use memory from this system in your next one. Memory Our Econobox had quite a long run with four gigs of RAM as standard. Sadly, that was only possible because of a wave of oversupply and various other factors that wreaked havoc in the memory industry. The situation has now stabilized, and memory prices are back to their pre-crunch levelgood news for memory makers but bad news for us. Until memory makers resume bankrupting themselves to flood the market with cheap RAM, we’ll have to step down to 2GB to stay within our budget. Crucial’s 2GB DDR3-1333 memory kit ought to be sufficient for everyday use and even most cross-platform games, and it’s covered by a lifetime warranty. Should the upgrade itch strike you some time in the future, our recommended motherboard has room for two more 1GB DIMMs. We’ve set aside a 4GB kit for inveterate multitaskers and hard-core gamers in our alternatives, as well. Graphics As much as we want to fashion the Econobox into a lean, mean gaming machine, we have to make minor sacrifices to keep close to our $500 budget. XFX’s Radeon HD 5670 is a good compromise. This graphics card doesn’t quite have the muscle of the Radeon HD 5750, but as we saw in our review, the 5670 is still powerful enough to run the latest and greatest games at 1680×1050 with antialiasing turned up. Fittingly, 1680×1050 happens to be the native resolution of most budget 20″ and 22″ monitors with 16:10 aspect ratiosideal companions for the Econboox. If you feel the urge to pair the Econobox with a bigger, higher-resolution display, head on to our alternatives for a meatier GPU recomendation. Storage Western Digital has three 640GB hard drives in this price range, and we think the Caviar Black works best as a system drive. Not only does it have a full 7,200-RPM spindle speed, 32MB of cache, and the same noise level ratings as the slower SE16 model, but WD also covers the Black with a five-year warranty. We haven’t seen another 640GB hard drive with specifications quite as good or warranty coverage quite as long. For our optical storage option, Samsung’s SH-S223L makes another appearance here. We like its combination of positive user reviews and low pricing, and its Serial ATA interface is reasonably future-proof. Samsung even includes LightScribe support. Enclosure and power In this edition of the guide, the Antec NSK 4482B is out, and the NSK 4482 is in. These two enclosures are actually identical in virtually all respects except for color and price, but Newegg inexplicably charges more for the all-black 4482B. The plain 4482’s silver front panel brings down the price by about 20 bucks, but buyers are still getting a 380W, 80%-efficient power supply (with 80 Plus Bronze certification), nice noise-reduction features, plenty of room for hard drives and expansion, and a clean, easy-to-work-in layout. You might find cheaper cases out there, but we don’t think you’ll be able to save a whole lot once the cost of a PSU is factored into the equation. Besides, bargain-bin power supplies generally have inflated specifications. A cheap PSU can also jeopardize system stability, damage sensitive components over time, and potentially even flame out in spectacular fashion, taking system components with it in the process.

Econobox alternatives Want to tweak the Econobox with a more overclockable and power-efficient CPU, more RAM, or a different graphics config? Read on. Component Item Price Processor Intel Core i3-530 $119.99 Motherboard Gigabyte GA-H55M-USB3 $109.99 Memory Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 $99.99 Graphics XFX Radeon HD 5770 $159.99 Enclosure Antec Three Hundred w/ 430W PSU $99.95 Processor As we noted on the previous page, the Core i3-530 falls a little behind the Athlon II X4 630 in our benchmark suite overall. However, the Intel CPU also happens to have much better power efficiency and incredible overclocking potential. We got ours to just over 4.4GHz after swapping the stock cooler for a tower-style heatsink; the chip subsequently ran our Cinebench test almost as quickly as the $200 Core i5-750 at that speed, despite having two fewer cores. The icing on the cake? Even with a relatively power-hungry H57 motherboard, our Core i3-530 system overclocked to 4.4GHz only drew about 5W more under load than the Athlon II X4 630 build running at stock speeds. Just make sure to check out this guide’s last page for our aftermarket cooler recommendations. Motherboard We usually feature a motherboard with integrated graphics in our Econobox alternatives. Today, Gigabyte’s GA-H55M-USB3 fills in as both our Intel motherboard and our IGP option, since it can pipe the Core i3-530’s integrated graphics through VGA, DVI, DisplayPort, and HDMI outputs. (Clarkdale processors all have integrated graphics cores on the actual CPU package.) In spite of its microATX form factor, this puppy also features dual physical PCI Express x16 slots, USB 3.0, external SATA, and FireWire connectivity. Slightly cheaper H55 mobos do exist, but none have those kinds of perks. Memory We aimed to keep our primary build near the $500 mark, but you don’t have to. Anyone with a little more spare cash ought to consider jumping up to 4GB of RAM, which should smooth out multitasking and long gaming sessions. Windows 7 isn’t quite as resource-intensive as Vista, but it will still put spare memory to good use thanks to technologies like SuperFetch. Now, you’ll need a 64-bit operating system to take full advantage of all this memory. 32-bit OSes have enough address space for 4GB of RAM (here in the form of an affordable Crucial kit), but that figure is an upper limit for all memory in a system, including video RAM. In practice, 32-bit versions of Windows will only let you use 3 to 3.5GB of actual system memory, and they’ll normally restrict each application’s RAM budget to 2GB. Workarounds exist for 32-bit Windows, but Microsoft says they can hurt compatibility; it advises that folks run a 64-bit version of Windows instead. Considering how many pre-built PCs ship with Win7 x64 these days, we’re inclined to echo that recommendation. Check out our OS section on the second-to-last page of the guide for more details. Graphics Similarly, folks who play state-of-the-art 3D games may want to step up to the new Radeon HD 5770. We saw first-hand that this card pretty much shadows the old Radeon HD 4870 1GB, generally reaching playable frame rates at 1920×1200 with 4X antialiasing. The 5770 also consumes quite a bit less power, generates less noise with the stock cooler, has a shorter circuit board, and has better texture filtering than its predecessor. Last, but not least, the 5770’s DirectX 11 support may bring image quality or performance bonuses in DX11 games like Battlefield: Bad Company 2, DiRT 2, and Metro 2033. We chose XFX’s variant of the 5770 because it has double-lifetime warranty coverage, a relatively quiet dual-slot cooler, and a price tag barely above that of other models. Enclosure and power We’ve always stuck with an affordable, quiet case and PSU bundle for the Econobox. Considering some of the hardware we’re now throwing into this build, though, a more enthusiast-focused alternative seems to be in order. The Antec Three Hundred should fit that role quite well. Compared to the NSK 4482 from our primary picks, this case has a more powerful, bottom-mounted 430W power supply, several additional fan mounts (including one 140-mm fan at the top and room for two 120-mm front fans), extra storage bays, and a more attractive mesh front panel. The Three Hundred admittedly lacks some of the NSK 4482’s noise-reduction features, like hard drive mounting grommets, an 80 Plus-certified PSU, and a limited number of vents for noise to escape through. Still, we find this a more appropriate choice for, say, someone who might want to grab one of those Core i3-530s and see how far they can overclock it.

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.

Component Item Price Processor Intel Core i5-750 $199.99 Motherboard Asus P7P55D-E $144.99 Memory Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 $99.99 Graphics XFX Radeon HD 5770 $159.99 Storage Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB (6Gbps) $119.99 Samsung SH-S223L $26.99 Audio

Integrated $0 Enclosure Antec Sonata III w/500W PSU $119.99 Total Buy this complete system at Newegg $871.93 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 1920×1200 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.

Utility Player alternatives As with the Econobox, we have some alternative propositions for how to fill out the Utility Player. You might notice we’re not throwing in a processor alternative here. We noted earlier that the Core i5-750 outclasses all of its competitors in our value rankings. You could go with a Phenom II X4 965 for a few dollars less, but why do that when the Core i5-750 has both better overall performance and substantially lower power consumption? Component Item Price Graphics XFX Radeon HD 5850 $309.99 Storage Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB $89.99 Lite-On iHOS104-08 Blu-ray reader $64.99 Audio Asus Xonar DX $89.99 Graphics The Radeon HD 5770 might be quick enough to run most games at 1920×1200 with antialiasing on, but the Radeon HD 5850 guarantees smoother frame rates at those settings and the ability to run a good number of titles at 2560×1600 with AA enabled, as well. Not only that, but the 5850 should yield higher frame rates in DirectX 11 games that put a greater strain on the GPU than vanilla cross-platform titles. An XFX card gets our nod of approval here because of its double-lifetime manufacturer warranty and relatively competitive pricing. At this point, some readers may be wondering why they haven’t yet seen the $230-240 Radeon HD 5830 anywhere in this article. May we suggest you peruse our review of that product to understand our decision. In a nutshell, the 5830 costs too much for the relatively small performance jump it provides over the Radeon HD 5770. You’d be better off saving up a little more and getting the 5850, which is considerably faster than both the 5830 and the 5770. Storage We’re not quite as confident in the 1TB SpinPoint F3 as we are in the Caviar Black, since we haven’t tested the Samsung drive yet. However, the SpinPoint’s specs look solid: a full 7,200-RPM spindle speed, 32MB of cache, and two 500GB platters. More importantly, Samsung quotes noise levels of up to 29 dB during seeks, which should be quieter than the new 1TB Caviar Black, for which WD quotes maximum seek noise of 33 dB. On the flip side, we wouldn’t be surprised if the SpinPoint had poorer random access times and lower overall performance than the Caviar. Looking at Blu-ray drives, Lite-On’s iHOS104-08 should do a fine job as a stand-alone reader; it has great user reviews, relatively recent software (PowerDVD 8), and an affordable price. None of the combo offerings we’ve come across lately really stand out, usually because of lackluster software bundles or high prices. In the end, we figure you’re better off pairing a Blu-ray reader with the DVD burner from our primary parts list. Audio Again, onboard audio can’t match the analog output quality of a good sound card like Asus’ Xonar DX. The Xonar also happens to handle real-time Dolby Digital Live encoding, and it does a pretty good job of emulating EAX 5.0 positional audio effects, which is an extra bonus for gamers. Just about anyone with a decent set of analog speakers or headphones should be able to appreciate the difference in output quality between the Xonar and our onboard audio.

Sweeter Spot alternatives Perhaps you want to max out your RAM, or maybe you’d like a different hard drive and some TV tuning options. Regardless, our alternatives should cover your needs. Component Item Price Memory Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 $99.99 Crucial 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1333 $99.99 Graphics Asus GeForce GTX 470 $349.99 Storage Corsair Nova 128GB $369.00 Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB $139.99 TV tuner

Hauppauge WinTV-HVR 1800 MCE kit $99.99 Memory Sure, RAM isn’t anywhere near as cheap now as it was last year, but some folks may still want to fill each of our recommended motherboard’s memory slots with a 2GB DDR3 module (using a pair of 4GB Kingston kits). Anyone who goes that route will need only ensure they run a 64-bit operating system; otherwise, making use of more than 4GB or so will prove problematic. Graphics As we saw in our testing, Nvidia’s new GeForce GTX 470 fails to outpace the Radeon HD 5850 substantially in real-world games, actually falling behind it in many cases. That’s not terribly enticing for a card with not only a higher price tag, but also higher noise levels, higher temperatures, and higher power draw. To make matters worse, the GeForce GTX 470 still isn’t available right now. These shortcomings don’t warrant shunning Nvidia entirely for another edition of the guide, though. Newer Radeons have been dogged by supply problems, so we’re happy to have a DX11-capable alternative to recommend. Plus, some folks may find value in this card despite its handicaps. For one, the GF100 GPU has formidable geometry processing capabilities that may become an advantage in future games. We also suspect the GF100 has great GPU computing performance, which could come in handy if OpenCL-enabled consumer applications start flooding the market. On top of that, the GeForce has PhysX and 3D Visiontwo features that lack alternatives on the AMD side right now. (To its credit, though, our Radeon HD 5850 can drive one more monitor than the GeForce.) We’ve included this Asus variant of the GTX 470 as a provisional recommendation, because Asus offers three years of warranty coverage regardless of whether the user registers or notalmost better than some of the lifetime deals we’ve seen, which often fall back to one year if you forget to sign up. No retail-boxed GTX 470s seem to be available right now, though, so you may have to wait a little bit… or check out what else Newegg has in stock. Our price search engine might also be a good resource. Storage Some folks might want to complement all of this nice hardware with a state-of-the-art storage solution, so we’ve thrown an SSD into the mix. Corsair’s Nova 128GB solid-state drive delivers a fine combination of performance and capacity at a fairly reasonable price (about 130 bucks less than Intel’s 160GB X25-M). Corsair has implemented TRIM support, which should keep used-state write speeds from sinking too low in WIndows 7, and the firm quotes top sequential transfer speeds of 270MB/s while reading and 195MB/s while writing. 128GB should be enough room to store an operating system and a few applications, too. Other apps and files will have to sit on an auxiliary, mechanical hard drive, which is where WD’s 2TB Caviar Green comes in. The Green may be slower than 7,200-RPM models, but it’s much quieter, and you’ll have to work hard to fill the drive up. TV tuner The AVerMedia AVerTV Combo PCIe tuner of system guides past has faded out of online listings. In its absence, we’ve chosen Hauppauge’s WinTV-HVR 1800 MCE kit. Just like the AVerTV, this tuner has a PCI Express x1 interface, inputs for both analog and digital TV, support for ATSC and Clear QAM high-definition digital TV standards, a hardware MPEG encoder, Windows Vista certification, and a remote that works with Windows Media Center. Newegg customers sound fairly happy with it, too.

Honey, I shrunk the Utility Player!

microATX and proud

And now, for the Spring system guide’s one-off configuration, we present “Honey, I shrunk the Utility Player”an apt description of what’s happened here. We took some of the core components from our mid-range Utility Player build, strapped them to a microATX motherboard and enclosure, and biased our component choices in favor of low noise levels. The result is a smaller, more discreet system that’s just as potent and nearly as cheap.

The operating system

Which one is right for you? Before we begin, we should acknowledge that some readers may not feel comfortable with Windows’ prominent place on this page. We hold no particular grudge against Linux or other desktop operating systems, but we think most TR readers will want to stick with Windows. For starters, most of you play PC games, and we’ve tuned all of our main configs for gamingsomething Linux doesn’t do nearly as well as Microsoft’s OSes. Also, we figure enthusiasts with enough expertise to run Linux on their primary desktops will already have a favorite Linux distribution picked out. As for Mac OS X, we find both the dubious legality and the lack of official support for running it on standard PCs too off-putting. Now, if you’re buying a copy of Windows today, you should really be thinking about Windows 7. We explained in our review that this OS may well be Microsoft’s finest to date, because it draws from Vista’s strengths while adding a healthy dose of polish, not to mention improved performance and non-disastrous backward compatibility. Building a new system with Windows 7 instead of Vista or XP is really a no-brainer at this point. Just like its predecessors, Windows 7 comes in several different editions, three of which you’ll find in stores: Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. What makes them different from one another? The table below should help answer that question: Windows 7 Home Premium

Windows 7 Professional

Windows 7 Ultimate

New Aero features X X X Windows Search X X X Internet Explorer 8 X X X Windows Media Center X X X HomeGroups X X X Full-system Backup and Restore X X X Remote Desktop client X X X Backups across network X X Remote Desktop host X X Windows XP Mode X X Domain Join X X BitLocker X Interface language switching X Pricefull license $183.49 $274.49 $291.99 Priceupgrade license $109.99 $179.49 $199.99 PriceOEM (64-bit) license $104.99 $139.99 $174.99 PriceOEM (32-bit) license $104.99 $139.99 $174.99 PriceAnytime Upgrade > $89.99 $139.99 As you can see, Windows 7 editions follow a kind of Russian nesting doll pattern: Professional has all of the Home Premium features, and Ultimate has everything. Since most users probably won’t find the Ultimate edition’s extras terribly exciting, the choice ought to come down to Home Premium vs. Professional for almost everyone. Some of TR’s editors like hosting Remote Desktop sessions and running network backups, so we’d probably go with the Professional package unless we were on a tight budget. However, we should also note that Windows 7 Home Premium includes some features formerly exclusive to more upscale editions, namely full-system backups and Previous Versions (a.k.a. Shadow Copy). See our review for more details. If you go with Home Premium and find you need some of the Professional features down the road, you can always use the Anytime Upgrade program to step up. It’ll only set you back $90. Speaking of upgrades, you’ll notice upgrade licenses are quite a bit cheaper than full ones. That’s because you need a legit version of Windows XP or Windows Vista to use them. The edition doesn’t matter, but you do need the previous OS to be activated and installed on your hard drive for the Windows 7 upgrade to work. Mind you, Vista upgrade installers don’t seem to protest when a user does a clean install of Vista without a product key and then runs an upgrade installation over that. Windows 7 could allow for the same trick. Microsoft doesn’t sanction this method, however, and who knows how future updates to the Windows activation system might affect it. To save even more, you could also opt for an OEM license. Microsoft aims these at pre-built PCs, and for that reason, it prohibits users from carrying an OEM license over from one PC to another one. You may therefore be forced to buy a new copy of Windows 7 after a major upgrade. (Retail editions have no such limitation, as far as we’re aware.) Also unlike their retail brethren, OEM licenses only cover one version of the software32-bit or 64-bitso you’ll have to pick one or the other up front and stick with it. That brings us to another point: should you go 32-bit or 64-bit? Since all of the processors we recommend in this guide are 64-bit-capable and all but one of our systems has 4GB of memory or more, the x64 release strikes us as the most sensible choice. This recommendation is relevant to folks who buy retail and upgrade editions, tooyou might have to ask Microsoft to ship you x64 installation media first, but installing an x64 variant looks like the best idea. As we’ve already explained, 32-bit flavors of Windows only support up to 4GB of RAM, and that upper limit covers things like video memory. In practice, that means that your 32-bit OS will only be able to use 3-3.5GB of system RAM on average and even less than 3GB if you have more than one discrete GPU. With new OSes and games pushing the envelope in terms of memory use, the 4GB limit can get a little uncomfortable for an enthusiast PC. There are some caveats, however. 64-bit versions of Windows don’t support 32-bit drivers, and they won’t run 16-bit software. You’ll probably want to make sure all of your peripherals have compatible drivers, and vintage game lovers may also have to check out emulators like DOSBox. Still, hardware makers have improved x64 support quite a bit since Vista came out three years ago, so you’ll probably be fine unless you have something like a really old printer. (For some background on what makes 64-bit computing different at a hardware level, have a look at our take on the subject.)