What Hardware Should I Buy? - Oct 2008

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor and Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing:£187.99 (inc. VAT) + £77.30 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $279.99 (ex. Tax) + $122.99 (ex. Tax)

How can you improve on a terabyte of storage? By coupling it with a blisteringly fast 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor drive from Western Digital - that’s how! By using a 10,000 RPM 2.5” hard disk, the drive heads have less distance to travel, allowing the drive to achieve phenomenal read seek times of just 4.2 ms and a write seek time of just 4.7ms. The drive is then mounted onto an enormous heatsink to dissipate motor heat and expand the drive to full 3.5" size allow it to be fitted into any standard hard disk drive mount.

While faster solid state drives are available, we feel the technology is still in its infancy and that frankly extortionate cost per/GB is holding solid state drives back for now at least. Once the price comes down, we’ll inevitably see SSDs replace high speed mechanical drives like the VelociRaptor, but for now, the super fast mechanical drive still has our vote.

The speed of the 10,000 RPM VelociRaptor, used as a boot partition, combined with the already impressive performance and enormous capacity of the 1TB Samsung drive results in a storage array that provides both excellent system performance and plenty of storage space, and all for less than the price of a single 160GB SSD.

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Noctua NH-U12P
UK Pricing: £42.16 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $64.99 (ex. Tax)

We see a lot of very expensive CPU coolers here at bit-tech, and sadly for the most part they're rarely a decent option for cooling your CPU. Frequently built too large, too high or just too damn noisy; in the world of heatsinks at least, bigger is most certainly not always better.

However, the Noctua NH-U12P manages to achieve both excellent cooling with fantastically quiet performance and excellent thermal results too, combining to make one of our favourite heatsinks ever. Despite operating at a very low 19dBa thanks to its special SSO bearing fan, the cooler is still able to keep our notoriously hot test system at a comfortable 23°C above ambient temperatures at load.

While there are coolers which perform better thermally, none do it so quietly, and for the complete package of high-end air cooling and excellent acoustic performance, the Noctua NH-U12P is one of the best options out there. It'll even be compatible with Intel's new socket 1366 CPUs too with a small update that should be available soon, so it should be able to keep your upgrades cool for a long time to come.

Alternatively: Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme
UK Pricing: £34.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $52.99 (ex. Tax)

For those who are looking to get the absolute best air cooling, then there is only one heatsink for you - the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. Still the champion when it comes to pure thermal performance, the "TRUE" is still the thermal performance benchmark by which we judge all the heatsinks we test.

However, performance comes at a price, and at £35 without a 120mm cooling fan, you're going to be spending the best part of £50 on your air cooling setup once you've paired the TRUE with a high-end fan. Despite the high cost though, if you're serious about keeping you CPU as cool as it can be using air alone, then the TRUE is the only choice to make.

Optical Drive

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

With an increased budget, you really should consider grabbing yourself a Blu-ray drive, and this one combines Sony's high definition format with all the usual DVD-RW and CD-RW functionality you'd expect from a cheaper drive.

Using this OEM drive, and your choice of movie playback software, you're effectively turning your PC into a high end Blu-ray player for less than £130. Just remember that you'll need a monitor capable of 1,920 x 1,080 resolution to get the full 1080p high definition playback Blu-ray discs are capable of.

Operating System

First Choice: Windows Vista Home Premium x64 OEM
UK Price: £67.95 (inc. VAT)
US Price: $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 so ludicrously high, we'd still recommend buying OEM software even for a high-end machine, especially when you consider that a retail copy of Vista is three times more expensive than OEM! Buying OEM software isn't a problem as long as you’re buying components to go along with it, but the question is: which version do you choose?

As this is our Premium system, you might expect us to recommend Vista Ultimate, but no, we still think Windows Vista Home Premium x64 is the pick of the bunch. Vista Ultimate just doesn't justify the extra investment for the limited extra features, and unless you're deadly serious about PC security with Vista Ultimate's BitLocker capabilities, or really like animated backgrounds, Windows Vista Home Premium still offers the best value Vista experience.

With this hardware, an x64 version of Vista is practically mandatory for the improved system memory support. On top of this, Home Premium supports DirectX 10.1, and will support DirectX 11 in the future, and there's Windows Media Center thrown in for good measure as well. Why pay extra for Vista Ultimate when everything you actually need is available in Vista Home Premium x64 for much, much less?

That's all from us this month! If you've any recommendations or suggestions you'd like to make to future editions of this series, please let us know in the forums. Also, if you have recently built a system of your own to a cost - we're keen to know how you got on with it!