Our $1000 build used a low-cost processor, but the system was made to handle a significant overclock without breaking the bank. Here’s the price list, before rebates.

These prices have been adjusted to reflect the cost at the beginning of this marathon’s publication last week, but the parts were ordered at the end of May. That means we couldn’t order components that didn’t exist in the market yet, and the price at the time of our order was $998.

A decline in total system price of $30 doesn’t seem that large, but our components also came with $100 in rebates. Why didn’t we include the rebates in our price list? Because when you’re buying a system on a fixed budget, you can’t wait for the rebates to clear on some parts before ordering the remainder!

A 45 nm process Wolfdale core clocked all the way down to 2.53 GHz with half its cache disabled, the low-cost Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 gave us high hopes for overclocking. But then we were confronted by an unpleasant surprise: Regardless of which multiplier we used, the MSI P7N SLI Platinum couldn’t push this FSB-1066 based E7200 beyond FSB-1333. Heavy hearted, we were forced to settle on a final clock speed at the processor’s maximum multiplier of 3.16 GHz.

At least we wouldn’t need a large voltage adjustment to get to this speed, as the system was perfectly stable at a BIOS setting of 1.23 volts.

With a limited number of “linked” multipliers available to nVidia chipsets, we picked a 1000 MHz data rate and found Crucial’s Ballistix DDR2-800 modules to be perfectly happy to run this speed at lower-than-rated 4-4-4-8 timings and 2.10 volts.

We tried overclocking the graphics cards as well, but when NVidia nTune reported the wrong default frequency to lab technician Shelton Romhanyi, he inadvertently overclocked to an “underclocked” frequency. Fortunately, further testing showed no noticeable performance difference from adjusting nTune’s GPU and shader clocks, so at least the performance hadn’t gone down. While nTune appears ineffective for controlling the graphics processor on Gigabyte’s custom-designed card, a graphics memory speed increase from 1840 to 2050 MHz data rate appeared to work.