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[H] Holiday System Guide - 2005

As the 2005 holiday season is near, we dug deep into our holiday cheer and came up with a Newegg four-way system buying guide. We applied $500 and $1000 to upgrade systems and $1200 and $2000 to full systems for both AMD and Intel-based purchases.

Introduction

It’s not officially the holiday season until we gauge how much buying power a dollar will buy at Newegg.com. Our last guide included systems from both AMD and Intel and we aren’t leaving either camp out in the cold for this edition.

For full systems, we scoured Newegg.com with budgets of $1200 and $2000 and looked at good buys for both AMD and Intel. For upgrade systems, we took budgets of $500 and $1000 and did the same. We’ve come up with good systems this year and we’ve even learned something for ourselves along the way.

As is our standard, we strive to provide foundation systems that can provide some upgrade room in the future. It is not uncommon for our own systems to survive one or two upgrade rounds before every component is replaced with new. This allows us to stretch our buying dollar well into the future by leaving room for upgrade paths for CPU, memory, or video cards without buying an entirely new system. We also want to give readers a look at the kind of components we’d spend the money on; these are all parts we’ve used in one system or another.

There are a lot of components to cover in a guide this size. We are breaking the guide into two major parts. First, we’ll cover the full systems at both price points. Then, we’ll provide our insight into how we spent our money on the two upgrades.

Our Sponsors:

Newegg remains an avid sponsor of our hardware buying guides. As a long time supporter of HardOCP.com, Newegg provided direct links allowing you to click through to Newegg to price check and order the system components chosen. While Newegg did sponsor this article, the full content of the article was left to HardOCP’s discretion.

This may be a "sponsored" guide; however, HardOCP does not receive any monetary compensation from the sale of any hardware. We have always thought that a review site making commissions directly off the sale of hardware could be considered a conflict of interest. That said, surely Newegg will be tracking how many people use the links in this guide to make purchases. So if you are going to use our suggestions here, please click through our links. Those sales keep Newegg happy and keep them advertising with us. Many thanks!