Here at the Bleeding Edge Translation Department, we know - having just completed our latest three-monthly exercise of specifying components for the Bleeding Edge workhorse PC - that whatever Intel calls their technologies, their products will continue to be obscured by a series of letters and numbers capable of paralysing the most nimble of minds.

You wouldn’t think, for instance, that there was much to choose between the E6200 CPU we recommended in March this year, and the E6220 Intel came up with for our June selection, but there was. The 6220 had double the Level 2 cache. Against that, however, some of the 6220s had less efficient stepping than the 6200s, which increased power consumption.

Three months later, and we have three more chips in that range, supporting the 1333MHz bus which will provide more memory bandwidth for these multi-core architectures. That means at most a 1 per cent increase in performance, but the 2.33GHz E6550 ($218), 2.66Ghz E6750 ($245) and 3.0Ghz E6850 ($345) chips also have a feature called G0 stepping, which means slightly better power consumption than previous CPUs in the range.

We doubt the average consumer is going to find it any easier to wade through all this stuff next year, which encourages us enormously. The Bleeding Edge Translation Department is probably not going to be put out of business any time soon.

Depending on your budget, you might opt for a faster version of these chips, but we’re settling for the E6550 as perfectly adequate for a workhorse PC. The performance and power consumption are better than the E6320 we recommended last quarter, but the price has come down slightly to $218.

Motherboards have also advanced in, umm, simplicity, with mainstream adoption of Intel’s P35 Express chipset, which replaces the P965 series. Three months ago, the first P35 Express motherboards were new to the market and therefore expensive. We recommended holding off until they’d proved their stability and the prices came down. For those who couldn’t wait – we specified the Gigabyte GA965P-DS3, based on the older P965 chipset at $145, while noting that we would have been tempted to pay $161 for the P version.

We’re happy to report that the Gigabyte GA965P-DS3 line has proved admirably stable. We think the additional features on the P35-DS3P more than justify the additional $20 on that model – and that’s the one we’d opt for - but we’ll exercise restraint on your behalf and specify the $152 DS3 version.

If you wanted support for DDR3 RAM, you’d buy the DS3R ($168), but the DS3P has two PCI Express x16 slots (plus Firewire and eSATA ports), and we suggest that the performance gains from DDR3 are minimal, and simply not worth the additional cost.
Our recommendation is for 2GB kit of 667MHz Corsair DDR2 RAM at $103.
We’ve stepped up our video card specification to the 256MB Gigabyte 8500GT, at $105. It’s a good all-round solution with better gaming capabilities than our previous recommendations.

We’ve decided this quarter to switch to Western Digital hard drives. We wrote recently about the 500GB Western Digital WD500YS, which has a MTTF of 1.2 million hours and a five-year warranty. But it’s more expensive and not necessary for every-day use. Instead, the 320G SATA II (16MB cache) model is good value at $96.

We still regard the Chimei 946D 2ms 19” DVI widescreen monitor as exceptionally good value – the price has come down a few dollars to $232 – but this is an area where personal preferences apply, and you should have a look at competing products before making your choice.

The price of the Asus SATA DVD drive, which ships with LightScribe labeling, has dropped substantially to $49. We’ve continued to specify a slightly higher-end Logitech mouse and keyboard combination, but you could save a little there, as indeed you could also do with a cheaper case than the ThermalTake Soprano VX.

The total of $1227 makes us confident that next year we’ll achieve a sub-$1000 workhorse PC. Which seems a much more achievable target than the one facing Intel.

Prices this quarter:

• Intel E6550 CPU $218
• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 Motherboard $152
• 2GB 667 Corsair RAM $103
• Gigabyte 8500GT (256MB) Graphics card $105
• WD SATA II (16MB) 320GB Hard Drive $96
• Chimei 946D 2ms 19” DVI widescreen monitor$232
• Asus SATA DVD Burner $49
• Logitech Elite/G3 Keyboard/mouse $75
• ThermalTake Soprano VX case $127
• Assembly $70
• Total $1227