What Hardware Should I Buy? - Oct 2008

Memory

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

The bare minimum of memory you should be putting into a high-end PC is 4GB, especially as the performance advantage is fairly significant over 2GB. This 800MHz/PC2-6400 kit from Corsair is fantastically priced at just under £50. It’s also pre-fitted with Corsair’s XMS2 heatspreaders allowing you to push your RAM that little bit faster if you wish, although you won’t be able to rival premium memory performance.

Just remember that you’ll need a 64-bit operating system like Vista Home Premium x64 to take advantage of more than 4GB of system memory. If you can stretch a little more - PC2-8500 modules will give you some more headroom but will typically cost £62.85 for some vanilla Nanya with no heat spreaders, or to get more elaborate again you'll be looking at £80+ for OCZ Reaper or Platinum, Geil, G.Skill or Corsair DHX for example.

Case:

First Choice: Antec P182
UK Pricing: £89.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $129.99 (ex. Tax)

Although it's over a year since its release, the Antec P182 is still the only case that we‘ve ever awarded a 10/10 score to and it’s just as good now as it was back then. Impeccable build quality is coupled with fantastic design, excellent cooling and a compartmentalised design that works wonderfully, results in a simply magnificent case that should serve you well for many years to come. At just £90 it’s excellent value too.

Alternative: Akasa Omega
UK Pricing: £123.25 (inc. VAT)

The best case we’ve seen in 2008, the Akasa Omega takes the tried and tested design inherited from the Akasa Eclipse and improves upon it with significantly improved ventilation and a stylish and well constructed aluminium door to hide away your drive bay.

The whole case is made of aluminium, so is deceptively light for its extra large dimensions and the build quality throughout is fantastic. The attention to detail is also good with detachable front panel cables, included coaster wheels and plenty of cable ties and clips to help keep the jungle of wires inside under control.

The Omega also benefits from the easiest build system on the market right now, with an unrivalled removable stainless steel motherboard tray, and the whole package is rounded off with genuinely silent cooling as standard. If the P182 is a little too common for you, the Akasa Omega is a seriously attractive alternative, albeit at a higher price.

Power supply

First Choice: Cooler Master Silent Pro 600W PSU
UK Pricing: £81.58 (inc. VAT)

We'd have the Be Quiet Dark Power Pro first to be honest, but it's just a bit too expensive for our build. The 600W Cooler Master Silent Pro on the other hand is almost as quiet (which is like comparing a nat sneezing to a flea), is plenty powerful and provides a solid, efficient power output without a huge asking price. Many would want to drop in a Corsair HX620W for £78.14 as both are modular, but as the Corsair is a few years older the efficiency will be lower, and we think the Silent Pro is actually a little quieter - an important differentiator for our readers.

Alternatively: Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 650W
UK Pricing: £96.35 (inc. VAT)

The Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 650W just amazed us with its performance when we reviewed it back in July. With supreme efficiency and literally silent running thrown into the mix thanks to its fluid bearing fan, it makes a fantastic choice.

The fact that it’s modular too just sweetens the deal, allowing you to cut down on unwanted cabling inside your case. The price might be a sticking point for many - £96 is a lot to pay for a 650W power supply, but in this case you genuinely get what you pay for and if you can stretch for it we'd recommend you do.

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Akasa 966BL "Blue Aurora"
UK Pricing: £24.06 (inc. VAT)

For just over £24, you won’t find a better CPU cooler – it really is as simple as that. Providing cooling on par with £35 coolers, the Akasa 966BL or “Blue Aurora” thanks to its blue LED lit fan, combines both powerful cooling with a relatively low noise 120mm fan that’s genuinely silent at half speed.

Strap this onto your LGA775 motherboard (yes, once again, it’s an LGA775 exclusive) and you’ll be able to confidently overclock your CPU knowing you’ve got cooling to spare.

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)

Although our budget is larger, there’s no need to splurge unnecessarily and a DVD-RW combo drive with SATA connections for a little over £15 is still the best option. Both drives come in a retail box that includes a detachable bezel for different colour cases and copy of Nero 7 for DVD and CD burning, which are both worth the few pence extra you’ll pay over brown boxed OEM drives.

Alternative: Pioneer BDC-SO2BK Blu-ray Drive
UK Pricing: £71.66 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $149.99 (ex. Tax)

If you’ve got a little money to spare, or just want to enable High-Definition Blu-ray movie playback on your PC, then this drive from Pioneer is by far the best value solution right now – it’s certainly cheaper than a Playstation 3!

Packing all the usual read and write capabilities on top of the ability to read High-Definition Blu-ray discs, it's an excellent combination drive, although you'll need to purchase disc playback software separately from companies like Cyberlink or Corel.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £77.30 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $122.99 (ex. Tax)

Even a year ago, 1TB of hard drive space for under £100 would have seemed like a fantasy, but now you can enter the “era of tera” for less than £80! The performance of the drive is one of the best there is too, easily beating older generation 10,000 RPM drives thanks to the huge data density on the three 334GB platters inside, all whilst running very quietly. You really will notice the improvement in HDD limited loading times for games and programs.

The sheer size of the drive is also a major positive, with 931GB of usable space once formatted; filling all that will take a very long time unless you’re the most rampant hoarder we know.

However, be wary that having one terabyte of your data on just one disk leaves you vulnerable to hardware failures, so consider picking up a second drive in the future and running a RAID 1 array for the peace of mind brought by hard drive redundancy: the motherboards we recommended both support this feature.

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.