[ARS] June 2007 System Guide

The ARS Technica folks have released their 2007 Guide, once again bringing us their recommendations for a Budget Box ($741.99), the Hot Rod ($1,521.28), and the God Box ($10,228.30).

Be a good system build archive reader and pay close attention to the alternate recommendations and reasoning behind their exclusions, and most importantly, don't forget to read the forum responses!

I am having a really hard time not pulling the trigger on that Hot Rod box plus a few upgrades, like two 500GB SATA drives, 4 GB of RAM, and a 24" flat panel or two.

I keep telling myself that I have no time for gaming, and that there aren't enough good new games out there to make this worthwhile. Blizzard's Starcraft 2 was pushed back to last year.

I do wish I had a 3D-capable system lying around so I could try out Ubuntu Feisty Fawn with all its desktop effects enabled.

[THG] Six P35-DDR3 Motherboards Compared: No Winner?

Tom's Hardware benchmarked six of the latest-gen Intel motherboards and was unable to pick a winner. The motherboards, all sporting Intel's P35 Express chipset, "offer support DDR3 memory and the next generation of FSB1333 Intel Core 2 processors."

Why should a fellow System Builder care about this article? In their conclusion, it is stated that all of the motherboards "were so close in performance that benchmark results can't accurately determine a winner, because the differences are smaller than the benchmark's degree of accuracy.... And that's why I can't pick a board for you. Each buyer must determine which "killer feature" set best suits his or her needs."

This is one less component requiring a great deal of research. Seems like a quick look at the features of a few boards sporting the P35 Express chipset will help you pick your winner.