Titles such as Crysis have raised awareness of Direct3D 10, while Supreme Commander proved that dual and quad core processors have a place in the motherboard of the average gamer.

It’s a shame then that it’s become progressively harder to identify which graphics cards or processors are better, thanks to the irrelevancy of megahertz and esoteric product names packed with hyperbole. Is an Intel E6600 better than a Q6600, because E comes first in the alphabet? Shouldn’t a GeForce 9600GT be faster than an 8800GT by the difference of 800 “whatevers” in its name? The answer would be “no” in both cases.

I recently made a few purchases for my brother, whose AMD-based system finally decided that being a working PC wasn’t hip any more. As part of the process, I had to put together a few parts that would serve him for the next few years, but wouldn’t leave him scrounging his pocket lint for food money.

Anyway, hit the jump for my recommendations.Note: For this guide, I’m going to assume no overclocking (running components faster than they’re rated for), and a preference for future-proofing.

CPU
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz
Cheapest price: $199
Paired with: GA-X38-DS4 ($216, Crossfire), EVGA 750i ($241, SLI) or GA-P31-DS3 ($86, single card).

It’s difficult to find single core CPU these days. But then, why would you want one? The benefits of a dual core processor for games and day-to-day tasks are hard to ignore. Even World of Warcraft, arguably the most popular game played today with minimal hardware demands, was recently optimised for multi-core processors.

The E8400 provides a good compromise between price and performance. For $200, you get 3GHz, two cores and a 45nm architecture. In simple terms, it runs cool and fast. By comparison the next CPU up, the E8500, is $100 more, yet provides only a few frames per second extra in most benchmarks.

Alternatives
Intel Core 2 Duo E4600: You should only pick this up if you really have no money to spend on hardware. At its cheapest, it retails for around $125, but, at 2.4GHz and with only 2MB of cache, it’s not going to future-proof your PC at all. At best, it’ll run current games decently, when paired with a powerful graphics card.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600: If two cores are not enough, you could always go with four. Intel’s Q6600 is not only cheap at $200, but it’ll make rendering videos and encoding audio a breeze – if you’re into that sort of thing. It’s getting long in the tooth these days, with the Q9300 looking to take its place as the discount quad core chip. Overclockers, make sure you get the SLACR or G0-stepping, as it runs cooler than the B3.

Why no AMD processors?: Before you say it, no, I’m not an Intel fan boy. The Q6600 CPU I run in my current machine is the first Intel chip I’ve had. Ever. Before that, it was Athlon all the way. Sadly, while AMD has improved its position with its latest round of Phenom CPUs, it still has some ground to cover before it can compete with Intel on both price and performance. I’d recommend keeping your ear to the ground if you’re particularly keen on AMD.

A note on motherboards: If you don’t plan to overclock or use dual-graphics cards, then you don’t need to speed more than $100 on a motherboard. However, if you do plan to run things hotter or have an SLI/Crossfire setup, you’ll have to spend around $200 – you cannot go past quality parts.

Video card
AMD Radeon HD 4850
Cheapest price: $212

AMD came out of nowhere with the 4000-series – in particular, the Radeon 4850. In both Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock the 4850 stays close to the high-end cards. Its price fluctuates greatly from store to store, but the intelligent buyer should be able to scoop one up for less than $230. It’s successfully displaced NVIDIA’s 8800GT as the price/performance king, and looks to stay there until NVIDIA can retaliate.

Alternatives
NVIDIA GeForce 9600GT: At $140, the 9600 is a powerful little card for gamers with modest demands. It competes well with NVIDIA’s 8800, and if titles such as Crysis and Assassin’s Creed don’t see regular play on your PC, then it’ll do fine. Just don’t expect it to cope with shader-heavy releases – basically, any game coming out in the next 12 months.

If you have a piece of hardware you’d like to recommend, post about it here!

Now it looks like NVIDIA’s plans for AGEIA’s technology aren’t just games-related.

You can head on over to FiringSquad for the entire interview, however, here’s the meatiest part of the short talk:

Second, the computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like real-time computer graphics. Physics is a natural for processing on the GPU because, like graphics, it is made up of thousands of parallel computations, and with our CUDA technology, which is rapidly becoming one of the most pervasive parallel computing programming environments in history, we can open this exciting parallel processing world to applications desperate for a giant step in computing performance—such as physics processing, computer vision, video/image processing, and a world of exciting applications we’ve not yet imagined.

What I’m getting from this is that NVIDIA isn’t so much interested in AGEIA for hardware-accelerated physics in games, but more what the massively parallel design of the hardware can be used for in certain general processing tasks. This is something AGEIA’s PPU and the GPU have in common.

Is NVIDIA looking to take on Intel and AMD? There’s definitely a place for this sort of hardware in specialised markets.

NVIDIA AGEIA PhysX Acquisition Interview [FiringSquad]