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Mid-Range

Sub £800

One of the most popular requests from our last list was a PC for less than a thousand pounds. Luckily with prices being so competitive we’ve been able to bring you two options for the midrange. One at around £800, and with a couple of changes we’ve got an extremely powerful gaming rig for just shy of £1200, and lots of room to manouver should you wish to adjust the line-up to your taste.

If you ever doubt how much more powerful hardware has become for an affordable price, you need to look no further than here. An excellent set of components that pack a much bigger punch than they have any right to. For the measly sum of £762 you have the outstanding Intel Core i5-4670K at the heart of your system. From testing the Aria Gladiator bundles we know how well the combination of this CPU and the Scythe cooler work, so it would be churlish to choose anything else, especially for the price. Graphics are handled by the HD7870, in Tahiti LE guise. An absolutely insane overclocker it’s still the best mid-range card around and, similarly to the HD7790 on our value system, it comes with Crysis 3, Tomb Raider and the brilliant Bioshock Infinite free.

Sub £1200

Now you might prefer to spend some more, and get an uncompromising gaming system. Keeping the majority of our components from the above system we make the following changes;

Upgrade the PSU from 600W to 750W. We want to ensure that our power supply runs cool and quiet for as long as possible. This isn’t only for our immediate aural benefit, but power supplies tend to be the component we upgrade the least so it usually survives an upgrade or two. The second, and by far the biggest, upgrade is to move straight to a GTX780. An absolute power-house of a graphics card, and here in the excellent MSI Twin Frozr guise. As we’re still on air at this price-point it’s important to have one that doesn’t sound like a vacuum when it’s under load, and the MSI is excellent. Finally to ensure good airflow we’re housing it all in the larger CM Storm Trooper case. The whole system comes in at just a shade under £1200, at £1191. Considering a good sized SSD, a fast CPU and a GTX780 we think it’s a bargain.

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Extreme End

One of the hardest tasks is doing a high-end system. It would be so easy to just go quad-SLI this and 64GB or RAM that, but we always want one that makes sense. Hardware changes so quickly that spending an absolute fortune is almost pointless because it will be out of date by the time you’ve built it. So we want lots of power, but sensible amounts. Of course there is going to be a huge price-tag for any high-end system, and this one is an SLI, fully water-cooled affair so you know it wont be cheap.

This is also the system that has seen the biggest changes. Last time we had Crossfire HD7970s on a LGA2011 system. This time round we’re going with SLI GTX780s on the LGA1150. So what have we chosen?