Weekly Buyer's Guide: Mid-Range System

Today, we release our second Buyer's Guide since last week. We had originally planned to release our first new Buyer's Guide on Monday last week, but delayed it to Tuesday for pricing reasons. Anyway, as stated in the first edition, you can look forward to Buyer's Guides every week, and after the end of each month we will retool our guides to reflect the new hardware and pricing of that particular time period. In case you haven't read our new Buyer's Guide yet, here's the basic format of them to be released on a weekly basis:

Week 1: Budget System
Week 2: Mid-Range System
Week 3: Cutting Edge System
Week 4: Overclocking System

For every component that goes into a computer, we pick our favorite piece of hardware as well as our runner-up piece of hardware. We've added runner-up hardware picks to our guides because it allows AnandTech to recommend a wider variety of hardware (especially for those willing to spend a little more than what we budget for a particular system). At the same time, we can be assertive enough with a first place recommendation so that new buyers aren't indecisive or confused about what to purchase. Most of the prices listed for the hardware that we recommend can be found in our very own RealTime Pricing Engine. Any prices not found in our engine can be found on pricewatch.com. In addition to our Buyer's Guides and RealTime pricing engine, we suggest that you peruse our Price Guides so that you are not only informed about the best hardware for your computing needs, but also where to find the best deals on that hardware.

We are always taking suggestions on how to improve our Buyer's Guides. If you feel we are not including a wide enough variety of systems in our guides, please let us know and we can see if it warrants an additional weekly Buyer's Guide.