What Hardware Should I Buy? - Feb 2009

Case

First Choice: Cooler Master ATCS 840
UK Pricing: £219.00 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $259.99 (ex. Tax)

Stock of Cooler Master's aluminium monster masterpiece has finally landed here in the UK, but the price tag for now is very steep. Cooler Master had told us it would retail at around £185, but you'll struggle to find stock for less than £200 right now. However, if you're buying an ultra high end system then the Cooler Master ATCS 840 represents the absolute pinnacle of high end cases to house it all in as we assure you is well worth the investment.

Not only it is stunningly gorgeous in either black or silver, it also packs fistfuls of brilliant little touches that elevate it head and shoulders above the competition. A pop out front panel, ball bearings in the motherboard tray guide runners, plenty of dust filters and a fully reconfigurable cooling system are just the tip of the iceberg.

Build quality is excellent throughout and the included cooling setup, while not as potent as its sibling, the Cooler Master HAF 932, is still very capable with one 120mm and three 230mm fans tasked with keeping your hardware cool. The cavernous interior is an absolute doddle to work with as well, and with space for E-ATX motherboards, six hard disk drives and mounts for a 3x120mm watercooling radiator, the ATCS 840 is big enough to easily accommodate even the most ambitious mod or build.

Perhaps the only downside other than the price is its size - it is VERY large and you'll need a whole lot of desk or floor space to accommodate this aluminium beast, but trust us when we say it's worth making room for.

Power Supply

First Choice: Corsair HX1000W
UK Pricing: £166.33 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $227.55 (ex. Tax)

While the components we've listed here won't really demand a 1,000W power supply, if you want to add a second Radeon HD 4870 X2 or GeForce GTX 280/285/295 in the future or have a pile of hard drives that would would make a Google data centre look small, a 1,000W power supply is certainly worth considering.

Corsair's HX1000W provides solid voltages and great efficiency, but most importantly here: it is excellent value for a kilowatt power supply. Most other 1kW PSUs come in at much higher prices and often don't offer a great deal of extra performance to justify the cost. It's also fully modular, allowing you to cut down on the mess of cables inside your case, and the cables themselves look fantastic and are of the highest quality.

The only downside is that when close to full load, the HX1000W can be quite noisy, but when running at half load (which the system we've picked out here will barely manage) it's much quieter and will be hardly noticeable over the other cooling fans in your case.

Very much like when choosing a quality case, an excellent power supply can be seen as a long term investment and by buying with future upgrades in mind, you'll ensure you won't need to swap out your PSU for years to come. Or at least, until some crazy new power supply connector standard is invented to make the industry tick over again...

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: G.SKill Titan 256GB SSD
and Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £472.72 (inc. VAT) + £77.04 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $605.54 (ex. Tax) + $94.99 (ex. Tax)

How can you improve on a terabyte of speedy mechanical storage? By coupling it with G.Skill's speedy 256GB Titan SSD that's how! Offering speeds comparable to those (and in same cases faster than) Intel's high end SSDs, but with the added benefit of of a very reasonable amount of storage space, the G.Skill Titan really surprised us. The innovative use of twin drive controller chips has allowed G.Skill to get the most out of the drive's Samsung NAND flash memory, and has completely resolved the micro-stuttering effects we observed on earlier generations.

256GB is more than enough for a boot partition and a healthy handful of games and the difference between even the fastest 10,000 RPM and an SSD like this in general operation is immediately obvious especially in regards to boot and game load times. When combined with the brute force storage of a 1TB hard disk drive or two, you have an ideal storage setup which delivers the very best of both worlds. Just don't look at your bank statement after making the purchase.

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Noctua NH-U12P
UK Pricing: £48.17 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $79.99 (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's even compatible with Intel's new socket 1366 CPUs too, so it should be able to keep your upgrades cool for a long time to come.

Optical Drive

First Choice: LG GGGC H2OL Blu-ray, HDDVD DVDRW combo drive
UK Pricing: £66.83 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $123.95 (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, as well as the ability to play the now defunct HD DVD high definition discs too.

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