"Guru3D offers you their annual PC Buyers Guide, this is the 2009 summer edition. This article brings you a set of recommendations of products we feel are great components to build yourself a nice gaming rig.

Guru3D's guide will only cover the box. Monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers are not included. We do this for brevity's sake, as the monitor alone would require its own guide, especially if I were to cover LCD monitors.

Since this site is called "Guru3D" this guide will target a system intended for gaming primarily while not spending heaps of money."

"Today TechwareLabs takes a look at one of the best graphics cards that ATI has to offer. The Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD4890. With the graphics processing power that we all know and love, and the addition of the award winning Vapor-X cooling, this card is sure to be a leading contender."

"To get the most out of any video card, you have to keep it cool! With that rule in mind and not having an LN2 pot hanging around, the only option I had was to increase the fan speed to 100% to keep the ENGTX275 as cool as possible during testing. After bumping the fan speed up, I started by pushing the GPU core up in 20MHz steps until it would lock up in testing. I followed suit with the shaders and memory to find their limits. Once the limits were found, it was a matter of getting the three parameters to work together. I ended up with solid increases on all three speeds. 731MHz on the core is a 98MHz increase over the stock 633MHz. The shaders offered a bump of 124MHz and the memory was the big winner with a huge bump of 172MHz. This overclock delivered solid increases in performance allowing this card to deliver performance almost equal to that of the ENGTX285 TOP, a factory overclocked card also from ASUS."

"When GIGABYTE first sent me this mouse I thought it would be something chintzy and cheap looking, but when I opened the package that arrived at my door I could see that this is a product which has been given a lot of thought as to the marketability.

In this set you get the mouse itself embedded with three Swarovski crystals from their Crystalised series. Also included is a certificate with an edition numbering, batteries, the RF transceiver that nestles into the bottom of the mouse when not in use and a carry case for it, adorned with GIGABYTEs logo."

"Cooler Master has been at the forefront of case marketplace for some time now but their coolers have been somewhat lacking. We looked at the V8 and V10 but were left wanting, reviewed the N520 and were a bit disappointed but now we have before us the Hyper 212 PLUS. This is an HDT cooler that is priced at a mere $40 and we have some very high expectations for it. Let's hope it can put its best foot forward."

"Thermaltake has always been on the cutting edge of technology and style when it has come to making components for the computer industry. The quality and attention to detail has been exceptional throughout the years with many innovative designs bringing new ideas to the table, especially with computer cases. Well, Thermaltake has made another step in style by re-living the well loved color combination of flat black and red trim in the form of a high quality computer case."

"In this review I will test a little LGA775/1366 CPU cooler from EVERCOOL, basically meant for HTPCs and low consumption CPUs and see how it does compare with the rest of the CPU coolers I have tested in the past, on the same platform."

"I am always looking for useful products that will make my life easier in the shop. Products like the HSPC Techstation, external Hard Drive units, the never hot soldering gun, and Power Supply Testing units. Power Supply testing units are as important as a screwdriver if you like to save time trying to figure out if a power supply works or is failing. Enter the Ultra Power Supply Tester."

"The mechanics for these interactions to happen are falling in place virtually every day, but a new standard is on the horizon to tie these ends together and make our lives - and the lives of browser makers - more fluid and transparent with its support."

"Lenovo's IdeaPad S10-2 is an somewhat of an odd proposition for netbook buyers. For those who completely missed out on the IdeaPad S10, this is a welcome update and a solid overall contender in the netbook space. For those familiar with the original, two feelings are apt to surface: bitterness and / or confusion. Indeed, the changes found on the IdeaPad S10-2 are minor, with most of the hardware remaining exactly the same. In fact, the vast majority of the tweaks are completely cosmetic, though we do think much thought went into this overhaul. Come on by the site and check it out..."

"Though it may have not started off that way, today's performance industry sees these two giants that we evaluate today - OCZ Technology and Crucial - butting heads across product lines. Both products promise the same speed, and carry the same capacity, and to be honest, even manage to perform with the same latencies - despite what Crucial has to say on the tin. So what is it then, that sets these products apart from the clashing titans? Only time will tell."

"Adding an SSD to a desktop or notebook that uses a traditional hard disk drive is a smart and efficient way to upgrade your PC. The Kingston SSDNow V Series is an entry level SSD that comes with all the software needed to clone your old HDD over to the new SSD. Read on to see if this drive goes down stuttering or if it stands fast and survives our testing."

"As we move up in MHz the one thing that we have to sacrifice is the latency or timings of the modules. At first we saw PC3-16000 kits launch with timings of 9-9-9-24, but as time has gone on we've seen companies improve upon that. The Dominator GT kit we looked at from Corsair just recently carried with it an 8-8-8-24 setup while also still being able to keep to that 1.65V maximum we want to see.

OCZ has kicked it up another notch, though. The low latency, low voltage kit we have with us today carries with it the same 2000MHz clock speed but some even more aggressive timings. We can see on the new OCZ Blade series modules that the company is able to offer us a very impressive 7-8-7-20 setup."

"Over the past year or so, an entire ecosystem of video editing, playback and transcoding applications with support for NVIDIA's CUDA technology has sprung up, allowing for the processing burden of many tasks associated with working with video to be offloaded to a suitable graphics board, thus theoretically leaving the CPU free to handle other tasks while also improving performance thanks to the parallel processing abilities of modern GPUs.

Today, we take a look at all of the applications available within that ecosystem, to see what CUDA brings to the table for anyone looking to work with video files or transfer them between devices."

"With more people having more than one computer the need to share and transfer files between them has grown. Vantec has come up with a product geared towards this market with the Vantec ezSHARE Adapter. It boasts an easy setup with no additional software to install and a setup time of only seconds. Let's see what the ezSHARE Adapter has in store."

"In the digital world of today, laptops, MP3 players, and even a growing number of cell phones (such as Sony Ericsson’s Walkman series or HTC’s G1 Google phone) are 3.5mm audio jack compatible, whether it’s a built-in capability or made available via an included adapter. What this means is that you can simply plug in a set of headphones or mini/portable speakers to get better sound out of your device than what the built-in speakers can natively deliver. These portable devices are obviously designed with user entertainment in mind – even if it’s only simple entertainment – and here’s where the new Eagle Arion 2.0 Soundstage Speakers really shine."

"This week we have for you one excitingly interesting test about performance scaling of HD 4890 against 2x HD 4890 in CrossFire mode, with two of the most popular processors in the gaming class of Intel and AMD - Core i7 920 and Phenom II 955 BE. Expect not much talking though, we'll get straight to the tests and their results.

The release of HD 4890 was quite acclaimed in hardware websites. Reviews were mostly positive - swell performance and good price. Respectively 2x HD 4890 became one of the fastest options for AMD/ATI graphic cards fans. so we decided to determine how much of performance boost you get with two instead of one, but with two different platforms. While Core i7 has more rough power - triple channel memory, 8 threads, its processor frequency is 2.66GHz, an the price of the system i s higher (how much you will find in the conclusion), AMD Phenom II 955 BE pulls its load at frequency of 3.2GHz. Right, lets find out what exactly matters for getting more frames in your games."

"Some time ago, we took a look at the Seagate FreeAgent Theater and today we turn our attention to the competing product from Western Digital: The WD TV HD Media Player. Effectively, you are able to take the multimedia content stored on nearly any USB device and deliver it to the big screen and big speakers of the home theatre in your living room."

"When Guru3D reviewed the OCZ Vertex, we where flabbergasted, when we tested the G.Skill Falcon SSD, we where absolutely amazed. And today's product from Patriot memory is not at all different.

Armed with a very sexy multi-channel Indilinx SSD controller and a nice fat 64MB cache we'll be looking at the Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD. A drive that has the latest revision firmware installed and when we bring it onto automotive terms .. an SSD with a lot of torque."

"If several terabytes of storage and a ton of features are what you need, than the TS-809 Pro NAS will have your business network covered both now and in the future. The eight drive bays combined with robust processing power and a much improved interface provide reliable storage and a host of other server functions for up to 512 network users."

"At 12 months old the GTX 260 name would have to be one of the longest lasting models we've seen from NVIDIA in a long time. A company that has a tendency to release new models almost quarterly has kept the GTX 260 around for over 12 months and while it's known as the GTX 260+ these days due to the improvements we saw on the model a bit back, it still follows the same principal.

What we also see with models that have been around for a while is that companies know the product and are able to really mix it up. Today we've got the latest incarnation of the GTX 260+ from Galaxy. Not only is it packing a nice little overclock, it's also carrying a pretty mean looking cooler that we'll look into more shortly."

"The ASUS GeForce GTS 250 Dark Knight is a graphics card that not only houses the smaller 55nm GPU, but also sports a very interesting non-stock cooler from ASUS that looks to provide even further cooling. Paired with the die shrink, the Dark Knight could post some very impressive results, both in terms of gaming performance and framerates but also cooler temperatures and a quiet fan setup. What's not to like about cool and quiet gaming prowess on the cheap?"

"Quite simply, in every important category, the MSI N260GTX OC V3 excelled. The great cooler kept things quite cool, and didn't make much noise. The power usage was very reasonable for the high-end performance. The overclocking threshold was the best we've seen, for core and shader overclocking...and in the most important aspect of a video card's measure (in this reviewer's humble opinion) -- in gaming performance -- the MSI's N260GTX substantial overclock was enough to reliably fly by the HD 4870 in our line-up, and was enough to out-perform the more expensive HD 4890 sometimes, and even once or twice, come within fractions of performing as well as the next-level up, GTX 275 class card."

"In this review, I will test a very interesting cooler from Prolimatech, which design fits perfectly with the rest of the cooling system on DFI LP UT motherboards, has a futuristic looking mounting system, and will compare its performance with the other CPU coolers I have tested in the past."

"The Xigmatek Midgard aims to redefine the mainstream case segment by packing it full with all kinds of features. From plenty of fan mounts to screw-less systems everywhere, along with an all black interior and a low, low price tag of $60. That is bound to get our attention, so we take a real close look, but will it manage to do away with the doubts?"