Mid-Range Computing

While budget systems should mainly be constructed with reliability and price in mind, with performance a fairly distant third consideration, mid range systems have a slightly different order of priority. Reliability is still #1 priority, but performance and price are in a sort of tie when building a mid-range system. Performance isn't of the utmost importance in this type of system, but it's also not ignored nearly as much as a plain old budget system is. Similarly, price isn't of utmost importance either, but buyers building a mid-range must be mindful of the price of components nonetheless. Performance and price don't lag too far behind reliability for mid-range systems, in other words.

With that information in mind, read on to find out our picks for best mid-range components this week.
Index Mid-Range System
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  • gordon151 - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link

    Come on Evan, thought youd know by now that the DSP in the Audigy doesn't support anything higher than 16/48 even though the DACs that it uses do. Thus no 24bit audio on Audigy ES. Only Audigy 2 and up fix this shortcoming.
  • Ecmaster76 - Thursday, February 26, 2004 - link

    While it might be iffy on the nforce2 boards external controller, I would definitely reccomend using the SATA version of the Seagate drive on the Asus board (stay away from Maxtor SATA, they use bridge chip that has a bad rep. for compatibility problems). I'm using a SATA Barracuda 80GB, 8MB cache drive and it is sweet!

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