Introduction

With the tons of possible choices for components out there, it’s hard to determine what the best choice is for you, especially when you’re looking for an ultimate performance machine. Some components work better on certain platforms, others work better with a different one. Generally speaking, the higher the price of the component is, the better the performance you get out of it. However, this is not necessarily true for all components. Most of us don’t have the resources or the time to go out and buy and try all types of video cards, processors and the like to squeeze every last bit of power out of our computers. The components that will give you the most performance out you’re your computer is obviously the processor and the video card. The main players in this game of video cards and processors are obviously Intel, AMD, nVidia and ATi. For the test runs we chose to use the latest offerings from all of these competitors.

The main purpose of this guide is to give you a better idea of what’s best for you at the moment, and what will give you the best performance for your hard earned dollar. The reason you spend hundreds of dollars on a video card or processor is to get the most out of your component and to get your system to give you every last frame that you can get per second. Obviously this guide isn’t going to be accurate for very long as new components are coming out each month, but it should give you a general idea of which direction you should be heading into. This guide is strictly to see what kind of performance we can get from the highest end performance products we can get.