The Processor and Graphics

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600

Running alongside the XFX motherboard is an Intel Core 2 Q6600 CPU. Why did we decide to go quad-core? Simple, while quad-core gaming is still in its infancy, in 2008 we’ll see game titles increasingly go multi-threaded. Practically all the major game engines have been patched, or designed to run with multi-core in mind. Obviously some games are more capable of taking advantage of quad-core than others – Lost Planet for instance scales nicely with quad-core under the right conditions whereas Enemy Territory: Quake Wars becomes a buggy mess with the SMP console command enabled – but we wanted to build this system for the future, and with multi-threaded games like Alan Wake coming next year, the Q6600 was the obvious choice.

The Core 2 Quad Q6600 has proven popular with enthusiasts on a budget due to its compelling price/performance ratio. For less than $300, you’re getting a Core 2 CPU with four processing cores running at 2.4GHz and a 2x4MB (8MB total) L2 cache.

The Q6600 has also proven to be a really strong chip when it comes to overclocking. Right now the hot stepping to have is the G0 stepping, the G0 stepping boasts slightly lower power consumption that B3, while enthusiasts have been able to push G0 chips well past 3.5GHz in many cases with good aftermarket cooling. Therefore when we opened our box from Newegg, we were glad to see the sSpec number on our Q6600: SLACR. Looking at the chip itself, the CPU was manufactured the 37th week of 2007. We’ll see how far we’ll able to push it in terms of overclocking a little later.

GPU: EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX

Graphics duties are handled by a pair of EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards running in SLI. EVGA’s cards are proving popular with enthusiasts right now due to their lifetime warranty program and their Step Up feature, which allows you to trade in your existing EVGA card for a faster model as long as it occurs within 90 days of the initial card purchase. This is helpful in the event that NVIDIA releases a faster GPU, or you simply decide you need a little more performance than the card you initially purchased. With EVGA’s Step Up program, you get the full value of the initial card you purchased, so all you have to do is pay the difference between the two cards.

EVGA also has their own line of factory overclocked SuperClocked and KO boards, but the cards included inside the SLI PC we’re giving away are the stock GeForce 8800 GTX boards that run at the standard 8800 GTX reference specifications – there’s no overclocking here.