What Hardware Should I Buy? - April 2009

Memory

First Choice: Corsair XMS2 4GB kit (2x2GB) PC2-6400 CAS5
UK Pricing: £37.54 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $44.99 (ex. Tax)

Choosing 4GB of memory over 2GB, even in a budget machine offers a big advantage for gaming, as Rich found out when we asked the question “Is more memory better?” last year. Load times can be significantly improved in certain games, and there are clear jumps in game frame rates in numerous popular titles.

Now DDR2 has all but bottomed out as far as pricing goes, it’s extremely hard to justify not having 4GB of RAM, just as long as you’re running the 64-bit operating system required to take advantage of more than 3GB of system memory.

At less than £35 this Corsair kit is fantastically priced and is pre-fitted with XMS-2 heatspreaders, allowing you to push the memory that little bit faster and looking a bit nicer than boring bare sticks. What's more, Corsair includes a lifetime warranty on its products, so there's that additional peace of mind if something goes wrong.

Case

First Choice: Antec Three Hundred
UK Pricing: £47.80 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $59.95 (ex. Tax)

When buying a case of just £45, it’s a lot to ask for both form and function and the Antec Three Hundred (300) eschews the former and concentrates firmly on the latter. While it’s utterly uninspiring as looks go, this case is technically superb, delivering both excellent build quality and a feature set that just can’t be matched at this price point.

The 300 comes pre-fitted with the standard 120mm exhaust fan and a whopping 140mm roof exhaust, both of which come equipped with manual three speed control switches to allow you to select the compromise between cooling and quietness. There are also extra 120mm fan mounts in the side panel and in front of the twin drive bay cages, with an internal layout that’s identical to that of the much pricier Antec Nine Hundred Two.

While the price might say “budget,” this a phenomenally capable case for the cash, and will do a brilliant job of keeping your core hardware cool even with the fans running at their lower speed. While it might lack the visual flair and fancy finish of more expensive cases, for the money there’s almost nothing that can match the Three Hundred.

Power Supply

First Choice: OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W
UK Pricing: £53.81 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $74.99 (ex. Tax)

The power supply is often where less experienced users will try and cut some costs out of a system build, opting for a low cost no name branded power supply over a proven and respected name brand – Big Mistake. Cheap and nasty power supplies typically deliver poor efficiency, are universally incapable of delivering their stated power load and are a borderline liability, especially when they have a reputation for exploding under high load.

Sticking with a name brand to deliver a reliable power source to your PC is definitely the way forward, but there's plenty of choice out there and differences between PSUs not always instantly apparent. We've selected OCZ's ModXStream Pro 500W, as it not only offers upwards of 80 percent efficiency regardless of load but is really very quiet and modular to boot! For a low end system like this the OCZ provides ample power, and despite our concerns with some internal capacitor choices for the long term it shouldn't be too stressed.

CPU Cooler

UK First Choice: Akasa 965
UK Pricing: £13.79 (inc. VAT)

Stretching your budget to accommodate an aftermarket heatsink over the basic stock model supplied by Intel is a great way of aiding your overclocking efforts, as well as cutting down on fan noise and improving overall cooling.

The Akasa 965 is a brilliant choice for just under fifteen quid, delivering cooling that puts heatsinks three times its price to shame and resoundingly beating our old favourite the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro in every category - it's a simply great bit of kit for the asking price and should definitely be on your shopping list even if your budget is stretched.

US First Choice: OCZ Vendetta
US Pricing: $34.99 (ex Tax)
UK Pricing: £26.06 (inc. VAT)

Unfortunately, Akasa doesn't sell much of its range in the USA, but the OCZ Vendetta is an excellent alternative for those living Stateside. Delivering excellent thermal performance on a par with the Akasa 965 thanks to three full length direct contact heatpipes the only let down is that the 92mm is quite loud at full speed, so be sure to make use of your motherboard's 4-pin PWM fan controls to drop the fan speed a little. The higher price is a touch annoying too.

Optical Drive

UK First Choice: Samsung TS-H653B 20X Black SATA DVD+RW Dual Layer Bare Drive
UK Pricing: £15.89 (inc. VAT)

US First Choice: LG GH0NS15 OEM
US Pricing: $21.99 (ex Tax)

At this price point, beggars can’t be choosers, but you can still pick up a DVD-RW combo drive for just £15 and in this day and age we insist on SATA ones, if only to banish those messy IDE ribbon cables. These basic drives are cheap but don't expect extra software, although there is plenty of free, open source burning software available from places like Sourceforge.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Seagate ST3250310AS 250GB SATA 3Gbps Hard Drive (7,200 RPM, 8MB Cache)
UK Pricing: £36.18 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $49.57 (ex Tax)

This Seagate drive is the cheapest 250GB drive on the market and is decent value at less than 15p/GB, while still packing in the all important 7,200 RPM platter speed and 8MB cache, although it is last generation’s 7200.10 drive and so uses smaller 188GB platters than the more recent 7200.11 and 7200.12 versions of Seagate’s Barracuda hard drives.

While this drive is affordable, and does pack a decent amount of storage to play with, it won’t be enough to suit heavy downloaders and file hoarders and buying a larger drive can seriously improve performance too. The jump in both capacity and speed from opting for a 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1 really is a big one, and considering a drive with three times the capacity is less than twice the price of the Seagate, we’d actively encourage you to think bigger when it comes to choosing a hard disk, especially as prices are so competitive at the moment.

Nevertheless, this 250GB Seagate drive with its three year warranty is our selection for an inexpensive machine and all our recommended motherboards have extra SATA capacity making it easy enough to add more storage later.