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Toms Hardware System Builder Marathon Every quarter, Toms Hardware sets out to investigate the PC hardware market. Armed with three budgets - usually $500, $1000, and $2000 - they assemble three builds and compare overall performance and value. Were right in the middle of the August System Builder Marathon this week. On Monday they showed off a $500 gaming PC. Tuesday highlighted a $1000 enthusiast PC, and today showcases a $2000 performance powerhouse. I always look forward to reading these articles every few months. When youre a PC gamer on a budget, building a computer is all about balance. Reading reviews of $500 video cards is great, but if youre planning on pairing that GTX680 with a dual-core i3 and 2GB of RAM youre going to be disappointed. Toms does a great job of demonstrating what you can get for your money using currently-available parts. Theyre experiments, and theyre not always perfect, but thats the beauty of it: read a few of these and youll get an idea of what percenta...

Toms Top 5 tips for malfunctioning holiday computers Good Christmas Day to all. Here are 5 tips for holiday computer hardware. � 1. If it doesn�t work at first, turn it off, wait five minutes, and then turn it back on.� 2. If you�re giving someone a gift that requires Wi-Fi access, make sure you�ve got the� Wi-Fi router name and password ready to pass out. You probably should have done this last night, instead of this morning in your pajamas. 3. If you intend to share a wired connection to your router, make sure you�ve got a long cable. Murphy�s Law states that the length of the connection is always shorter than the cable.� 4. For God�s Sake, keep the holiday goodies away from the computer hardware. You don�t want to spill egg nog or mimosas or whatever holiday beverages you enjoy into the keyboard or innards of that new $750 laptop! 5. If the error message �you see on the screen mystifies you. just type it into Google and press the ENTER key. You could also copy and paste it into the ...

Toms Hardware Seven GeForce GTX 660 Ti Cards Exploring Memory Bandwidth Image source: Toms Hardware Toms Hardware posted a pretty interesting article looking at the recently-released GTX 660 Ti. Specifically, the article takes a look at seven cards from various manufacturers and examines the impact of the 660 Tis 192-bit memory bus on gaming performance when anti-aliasing is cranked up. One feature of the article that I thought was cool was their noise comparison amongst the cards; seems like Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI are still among the best options. I still dont know what to think of the 660 Ti. The card seems like a dud at the $300 price point now that you can find HD 7950s in the $290-300 range after rebate. Present performance aside, the 7950s 3GB of VRAM and 384-bit memory bus are going to have a lot more staying power than the 660 Tis 2GB and 192-bit bus. If youre planning on upgrading your GPU every 12 months or so that might not matter, but for someone on a budget the prospect o...