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The Tech Report updated their system guide to account for some of the latest hardware releases, including Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti



We've got about a month of summer left, give or take, and that means the back-to-school season is in full swing. What about the PC upgrade season? Well, we've certainly seen the arrival of a few noteworthy components since the publication of our last system guide. Just today, Nvidia's new GeForce GTX 660 Ti raised the bar for graphics performance at $300.

Other recent arrivals include AMD's Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics card and Western Digital's Red hard drives. We've seen a continued decline in the prices of solid-state drives and system memory, too. Even mechanical hard drives have come down in price ever so slightly, taking a much-needed step back toward the pricing levels we saw last year, before the flooding in Thailand threw component suppliers a curve ball.

If you're reading this, you've probably guessed what this new system guide is about. We've updated our four staple builds to account for all of the new hardware and pricing changes. SSD and memory capacities have increased, and we've squeezed in faster GPUs in a couple of spots. We've also made other, more minor revisions to account for the inevitable price fluctuations and stock changes that have occurred since last month.
  TR's back-to-school 2012 System Guide