Conclusion

First, the components in our shopping list cost less than complete PCs from vendors such as Dell, eMachines or CyberPower. You also can take advantage of the Pentium D 805's extreme overclocking capabilities along with a modern dual-core processor architecture. Details for its impressive performance numbers are documented in our story A 4.1 GHz Dual Core at £80 - Can it be True?. This chip can also be cranked up from 2.66 GHz all the way to 4.0 GHz. This works best in combination with a good a water cooling rig, for which we recommend complete kits from Innovatek, Koolance and Thermaltake mentioned earlier in this story. Cheaper water coolers can be had for under €40, but they're largely a waste of your money. Those who'd rather avoid water cooling will have to satisfy themselves with over clocking their systems to clock rates between 3.6 GHz and 3.8 GHz instead. That results in operating temperature ranges that a cooler, such as the Zalman CNPS9500, can deal with in any case. Just be prepared to put up with a noisier system, because even the best fan cooler can't run as quietly as a water cooler at those clock rates.

The perfect position for the CPU cooler block - we built our own custom bracket using parts from our neighbourhood hardware store.

Some old-fashioned craftsmanship is required for those who build their own CPU brackets, simply because many water cooling vendors don't yet offer their own parts for socket LGA 775. To that end, we spent a few dollars at our local hardware store and crafted our own sturdy bracket ourselves. The CPU cooling head has unobstructed access to the top surface of the Pentium D 805 to achieve optimal heat transfer.

The other components we bought delivered very good system performance, and put comparably-priced complete systems available in retail channels to shame. Two SATA drives operate in a RAID 0 array, enabling data transfer rates of up to 120 MB/s. Total storage capacity of up to 320 GB is at your disposal, probably enough even for smaller high-definition video editing projects. Whether you go for the cheaper Asrock motherboard (an offshoot of ASUS) or the more expensive Gigabyte is your decision. Both motherboards support dual-core processors for socket 775, and work with the Pentium D 805. However, this wasn't the case for some MSI motherboards we also tried recently.

Water cooling from Koolance offers a large surface area on the heat exchanger that provides excellent cooling performance and enables whisper-quiet operation.