Here at PCMag.com, we have easy access to all kinds of technology products, which we test, write about, absorb, and return to their manufacturers. But sometimes all this isn’t enough, and we need products for the long haul. When that happens, we’re not above buying the things we need—or, if possible, building them ourselves.
So when one of my colleagues approached me recently about helping him put together a system he could use for mid-high-level software testing, we had to give serious thought to what would work best. And because he didn’t want to spend a mint—he was trying to keep it under $1,000—we couldn’t just instantly grab all the highest-performance parts out there.
We approached the problem systematically, just as we always advise you to do when you’re shopping for either finished tech or the pieces to assemble it. Was the most important consideration for this system? Speed. And we wanted to wring as much of it as possible from the parts we chose—all while keeping an eye on the running total as we furiously clicked around Newegg.com.
For the CPU, we picked one of the top current-generation value parts on the market: the Intel Core i5-2500. Priced at just over $200, this chip lacked the unlocked multiplier of its nearly identical sibling, the Core i5-2500K, but had its zippy 3.3GHz clock rate, four processing cores (but no Hyper-Threading), and the other features of the second-generation Core (“Sandy Bridge”) family. Uniting this with 8GB of memory was a no-brainer; we went with Kingston’s two-DIMM kit, which ran us less than $60. More
