Think our ultimate gaming rig is over-the-top? Well it was meant to be since it was built to be the best for the most hardcore. For the casual, non-elitist gamers, you don't require the highest-end components or give up an arm and a leg to have an enjoyable gaming experience. You want to frag with peace of mind, not to obliterate your bank balance. Drawing a line between price and performance, we've come up with a more mainstream system that will still be able to undertake all the rigors of gaming today while packing enough next-generation technology to give you headroom in future titles.
We do away with much of the fats to leave a lean PC with its core components still packing a punch. A Pentium 4 processor is used instead of a Pentium D, though you notice that both are actually equal in raw clock speeds. We chose a Radeon X1600 XT graphics card for this system. As far as mainstream is concerned, this baby will probably be ATI's next price/performance sweet spot for the X1000 range. You will still get SM 3.0 and HDR capabilities and with ATI's AVIVO video technology onboard, you can take a break from gaming and watch HD videos without any worries.


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HIS X1600XT IceQ DL-DVI DVI 256MB GDDR3 PCIe (H160XTQ256GDD) SRP: US$196
Step away from the bland reference designs with the HIS X1600XT IceQ DL-DVI. Claiming to cool the graphics core by up to 11°C over stock cooling methods and even reduce total ambient case temperature, it also runs incredibly quiet. The card comes with 256MB of GDDR3 memory running at 1.38GHz with a VPU core speed of 587MHz. |
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