What Hardware Should I Buy? - Oct 2008

Memory

First Choice: Kingston 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400 CAS5
UK Pricing: £25.78 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $33.99 (ex. Tax)

While we’ve seen that 4GB of memory offers very real advantages over 2GB, because our budget is limited here, 2GB is sufficient for most of our needs and for less than £30 the price is certainly right. Rated at CAS-5, the Kingston kit isn't the fastest memory on earth, but at just 1.8V it should have a bit of overhead for some performance tweaking, just don’t expect to squeeze too much extra out of it.

Alternative: Corsair XMS2 4GB kit (2x2GB) PC2-6400 CAS5
UK Pricing: £49.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $69.99 (ex. Tax)

While 2GB fits within our £450 budget, if you either swap out for some cheaper parts elsewhere or can stretch that little bit further you really should aim to put 4GB of memory into your system, especially if you plan on gaming. The Corsair kit is fantastically priced at just under £50, and is pre-fitted with XMS2 heatspreaders allowing you to push your memory that little bit faster if you wish. What's more, Corsair includes a lifetime warranty on its products, so there's that additional peace of mind if something goes wrong.

Just remember that you’ll need a 64-bit operating system like Vista Home Premium x64 to take advantage of more than 3GB of system memory.

Case

First Choice: Cooler Master Elite 330
UK Pricing: £27.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $39.00 (ex Tax)

While a case is something you might think about cheaping out on, a high quality chassis can last you for many more years than the rest of your system. However, if you’re on a tight budget and your old case met an unfortunate accident with a Dremel, then you could do a lot worse than the Cooler Master Elite 330. This is the case Tim used when building the £400 gaming PC, and while nothing special, it’s better than the mountain of unbranded crap you’ll find clogging up e-tailers' virtual shelves.

Cooler Master has a great reputation for building solid cases, and while the price might be small, the build quality is still decent. There’s space for seven 3.5” hard disk drives and four 5.25” drives inside, as well as support for both standard ATX and mATX form factor motherboards. The case is cooled by a single 120mm exhaust fan at the rear, but there’s also a 120mm fan mount at the front and an 80mm fan mount built into the side panel should you wish to upgrade your cooling at a later date.

While a more expensive case will have more features, improved build quality, superior cooling and be easier to build your system into (not to mention look better), the Cooler Master Elite 330 is a decent choice on this budget.

Power Supply

First Choice: Corsair VX450
UK Pricing: £43.48 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $69.99 (ex Tax)

We’ve looked at a lot of Corsair power supplies in recent times and they've had a significant effect on the market in just a few years, delivering excellent performance and value that competitors have struggled to keep up with. Indeed, when we looked at the company’s VX550W PSU, we found that it was a really awesome bit of kit that came with a very affordable price tag too.

Of course, there are cheaper units out there, but given that a reliable PC requires a reliable power source, we’d rather go for a brand that has a reputation for delivering just that (and not exploding under load). At the same time, while 450W may not seem like much, it’s more than ample for the machine we’re building here—and even for future upgrade opportunities as well should you want to beef up the CPU, GPU or even hard drive capacities.

On the connectivity front, there’s plenty of room for expansion as well, as the VX450W has two six-pin PCI-Express connectors, along with several SATA and Molex plugs for more drives. All in all, we don’t think you can buy a better power supply for the money.

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Intel/AMD stock cooler

With such a limited budget, an after market cooler is something of an extravagance, our funds are better spent on a better graphics card or CPU. Intel and AMD’s stock coolers are more than enough to keep your system stable and can even handle some overclocking thanks to the low power usage of the processor; just don’t expect to see world-beating cooling performance. Having said that, we did manage to get a 1.8GHz Intel dual-core CPU to a hefty 2.9GHz stable with a tiny Intel stock cooler, so it can still do the job that's required more than adequately on this budget.

Alternatively: Akasa 965BL
UK Pricing: £14.99 (inc. VAT)

If you can stretch your budget to accommodate an after market cooler, then the Akasa 965BL is a fantastic option for just £15. Delivering cooling that puts heatsinks three times its price to shame and being more than 15°C cooler than a stock heatsink, the cooler unlocks a lot more overclocking potential from your processor and is even easy to fit. However, those choosing an AMD based system will have to sit this one out, as the 965BL is LGA 775 only.

Optical Drive

First Choice: Sony DRU-190S 20X DVD±RW
UK Pricing: £15.95 (inc. VAT)

Lite-On LH-20A1S-12 Black/Beige Dual Layer DVD±RW
US Pricing: $26.90 (ex Tax)

At this price point, beggars can’t be choosers, but you can still pick up a DVD-RW combo drive for a little over £15 and in this day and age we do insist on SATA ones. Both the Sony and Lite-On retail boxes come with a detachable bezel for different colour cases and copy of Nero 7 for DVD and CD burning, which are worth the few pence extra you’ll pay over brown boxed OEM drives. At least this way your drive can match any case you have and you get some free software to make use of that DVD burning feature.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Seagate ST3250310AS 250GB SATA 3Gbps Hard Drive (7,200 RPM, 8MB Cache)
UK Pricing: £29.95 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $47.84 (ex Tax)

This Seagate drive is the cheapest 250GB drive we could find and is decent value at just 12p/GB - you will, however, find that larger drives work out cheaper per/GB but our budget is fairly limited here. Performance wise, you get the all important 7,200 RPM platter speed, 8MB cache, the 7200.10 is only last generation's model offering still impressive 188GB per platter (compared to "up to 160GB" on the older 7200.9s). What's more, Seagate’s excellent five year warranty is also thrown in for good measure.

While 250GB is plenty of space for an entry level system, it won’t pacify the file hoarders, but both our recommended motherboards, power supply and case have capacity for multiple SATA sockets for plenty of hard drives, so it’s easy enough to add more storage at a later date.

Operating System

First Choice: Windows Vista Home Premium x64 OEM
UK Pricing: £67.95 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $134.08 (ex. Tax)

It's fair to say that Windows Vista has had a pretty rough reception since its release in January 2007, but things improved a lot with the release of Service Pack 1 in March of this year. A lot of the early problems with Vista were related to poor driver support from third party vendors, and Nvidia was responsible for the lion's share of driver-related crashes – we're pleased to say that things are much better on that front as well and performance (in games at least) is now very similar to what you'll see on Windows XP.

There is a confusing array of options presented once you've decided that Windows Vista is the way forwards, but since the price of the retail editions of Windows Vista are well out of our budget for this particular machine, we were left to choose an OEM version of the software. This is not a problem as long as you’re buying components to go along with it, but the question is: which version do you choose?

Windows Vista Home Premium, of course, and we've opted for the 64-bit flavour as it'll give you more upgrade options in the future. We've built this system with upgrading in mind, so should you feel the need to upgrade from 2GB of memory to 4GB or even 8GB, your operating system is going to support it. Windows Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1 not only includes support for DirectX 10.1, but it also includes Windows Media Center as well.