Some of Bit-techs system builds seem a bit poor recently.
Look at their gaming workhorse recommendation for example:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/buy...should-i-buy/4
You can get an i7 920,6gb of RAM and an x58 motherboard for £461:
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Intel...MB-130W-Retail
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asus-...-SATA-RAID-ATX
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/6GB-(...d-CAS-9-9-9-24
Yet they recommend a Q9650,4gb of RAM and a P45 based motherboard for £400.
They say an overclocked Q9650 can exceed the performance of a stock clocked i7 yet the Core i7 can be overclocked itself.
They then find the most expensive AM3 motherboard for the Phenom II they can find and yet there are so many cheaper AM2 and AM3 based motherboards which will do the job well.
On top of this they say the Q6600 is a better choice than the X2 720 for gaming. This is what they say:
"Performance-wise, the triple-core system will be much slower than a Q6600-based PC."
However in this article last month they contradict this viewpoint:
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpu...i-x3-720-be/10
This is what they say:"the AMD 720 Black Edition shows a slight advantage in some of the latest games and multi-tasking compared to even the Intel quad core, but when it comes to very CPU intensive tasks like video encoding and rendering, the fourth core obviously stretches a lead. What AMD offers is evidently a pretty good balance between the two in terms of price performance - sometimes higher, sometimes lower."
This is despite the fact that 4gb of DDR3 or DDR2 ,an X3 720(around £110) and AM3 or AM2 motherboard is still cheaper than a retail Q6600(around £150) or Q6700(not OEM) and 4gb of DDR2 RAM. On top of this there are quite a few AM3 and AM2 motherboards for under £105 which can overclock quite well. This is around the same price as the P45 based motherboards they recommend too.
Of course they fail to realise that the Phenom II X4 940 can be had for less than even a Q6600 and the same goes for the Q8300. Both the Phenom II X4 940 and Q8300 are better choices than the old Q6600 as they are faster at stock speed,overclock well,run cooler and consume less power.
They also fail to mention the HD4850 512mb and GTS250 512mb which can be had for under £90 which are clearly better value than the HD4770 which is in short supply.
Their pricing is way out to as two of the main online computer parts retailers in this country(Scan and Novatech) have had the HD4870X2 for under £260 delivered for ages.
I like this line:
"We've still been free to list the products we wanted to as well, and we've worked with CCL to make sure the prices are competitive."
It looks like they are trying to spread fud methinks. Ebuyer has free postage too as has Novatech and they are cheaper too than CCL.
It seems with the merger of the Bit-tech and CustomPC websites(both owned by Dennis publishing) their recommendations are beginning to become quite irratic.