System Buyers' Guide: PCs for Under $1000

Intel Mainstream PC

If you have a bit more to spend, the next step up the pricing ladder brings a lot to the table: the Intel Core i3-530, a best-in-class H55 motherboard, a 1080p LCD monitor and a bang-for-the-buck GPU to power it. Now we're talking.

Though its price and associated requirements (LGA1156, DDR3) make it prohibitively expensive for entry-level rigs, we fully expect the Core i3-530 to be the starting point for bang-for-the-buck PC building guides around the globe anyhow. That's because at only $125, the Core i3-530 is not only the fastest dual-core processor available today, but also—with two logical threads per core—performs on par with the best budget quad-cores in most benchmarks. If that weren't enough, it features an on-die integrated graphics solution that rivals the best IGPs AMD has to offer (which isn't saying much, sadly) and it does it all while consuming less power than practically any other mainstream CPU out there. And thanks to its 32nm process and a 22x multiplier, it also overclocks to 4GHz using the stock cooler (YMMV).

Paired with this Clarksdale wunderkind is the ASRock H55M Pro, the best, least-finicky H55 motherboard we've yet tested. Featuring the onboard VGA, DVI and HDMI video-out connectors and Flexible Display Interface needed to make use of the Core i3's Intel HD IGP, the board also features a superb layout. It has a pair of PCIe x16 slots (one at x16, one at x4), a PCIe x1 and a PCI slot arranged in a configuration where none of its ports are liable to be covered by expansion cards. Speaking of ports, the board comes with five neatly arranged SATA 3GB/s ports on the board and three USB 2.0 headers, with an eSATA, six USB2.0 ports, a combo PS/2, a single 1394a and optical S/PDIF out on the rear panel. 7.1 channel HD audio duties fall to the VIA VT1718S, while a Realtek 8111DL handles Gigabit Ethernet. There's even a TPM header.

While the board supports all current LGA 1156 Core i7, i5 and i3 processors, up to 16GB of DDR3-2600 memory and even Quad CrossFireX, it's not really a board you'd slot premium DIMMs or multiple GPUs into. We found it to have only moderate overclocking potential, and the PCIe x4 puts the kibosh on even regular CrossFire giving you your money's worth. But for $95, it's a wonderful board on which to build a mainstream PC.

Given the fidelity of the onboard Intel HD Graphics, and assuming you don't care to play modern games in excess of 1024x768 resolution at minimum settings, a dedicated graphics card is honestly quite optional in a Core i3 and H55-equipped mainstream PC. Even without it, you can bitstream Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD-MA over the HDMI connection, handle hardware accelerated decoding of H.264/VC-1/MPEG2 streams, and drive large desktop screens. But because last year's mainstream rig included our editor-favorite Radeon HD 4770, it was hard to pass up the even more powerful, game-crunching $100 Radeon HD 4850. If you'd rather, you can get the slower Radeon HD 5670 for the same price and have access to DX11, Eyefinity and possibly 3D Blu-ray support later this year, or add $40 and get the best of both worlds with the faster Radeon HD 5750 1GB. Alternatively, you can save the $100, or put it towards one of the other goodies in our upgrade list on page 6. But know that when we were looking for a video card with enough value to automatically deserve a place in our mainstream rig, we immediately gravitated towards the 4850.

While all other base components are the same known quantities we used for our entry-level rigs, we upgraded two peripherals for our mainstream PCs that deserve mention here. First, because in-monitor speakers are notorious for their low quality, we bring back last year's Cyber Acoustics CA-3090 2.1 speaker system, a fantastic value even at $20 (compared with $16, nine months ago). Second, we upgraded the LCD monitor to the ASUS VH226H. At $150 after rebate, the VH226H offers far more than $30 worth of extra value over the $120 VW193TR it replaces: it's a 21.5", 1920x1080 TN panel with a 2ms grey-to-grey response time, 1000:1 typical contrast ratio, and the all-important HDMI 1.3 input jack alongside standard DVI and VGA.