PC Gamer Rig: 2 more shopping days to The Old Republic

Planning to do nothing over the festive break but sit in your unmentionables playing games? Shame on you, there's a whole world out there for you to explore and see you know. Even the most athletically aware of us must be planning to spend a little time with our PCs come Christmas, though, and there's still time for an upgrade if you will.

And how do we publish our weekly price watch and upgrade guide? In the guise of the PC Gamer Rig, of course. This veritable everygamer of a PC is designed not to be the fastest, nor the cheapest computer around. Rather, it's the one we think best represents the 'average' home set-up. Carefully budgeted to be buildable for less than £1000/$1500, it's the starting place for potential upgrades. Any one of these parts will make a fine addition to your system and keep it running for years. You can buy better components if you wish, but I wouldn't recommend buying any worse.

In the run up to Xmas 4.3 there's a lot of bargains to be had. The best I've found isn't going into the Rig, because it's just a little too expensive for our purposes there. If you're thinking of upgrading your graphics at the moment though, there's an overclocked HIS Radeon HD6950 going for less than £200 over here . Well worth a look. For US readers, the price difference between an HD6950 and a GeForce GTX 560Ti is a lot smaller than it is in Europe, and I'd be tempted to say go with the slightly more powerful AMD card, like this one , every time.