What Hardware Should I Buy? - July 2009

Case

First Choice: Cooler Master ATCS 840
UK Pricing: £203.03 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $199.99 (ex. Tax)

Cooler Master's aluminium monster masterpiece is still our choice at the bleeding edge, despite its steep price tag in the UK especially. 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 and we assure you that it’s well worth the investment.

Not only is it 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 removable dust filters and a fully reconfigurable cooling system are just the tip of the iceberg.

Build quality is excellent throughout and the included cooling set up, 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 mammoth, but trust us when we say it's worth making room for.

Power Supply

First Choice: Seasonic M12D 850W
UK Pricing: £167.57 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $199.99 (ex. Tax)

We've decided to go back to the M12D this month for two reasons: both offer very high quality and we don't think 950W or 1,050W is needed. Because of this, we're opting for the cheaper (on a watt to watt basis) M12D 850W instead.

The M12D is an excellent PSU - solid voltages, excellent reliability and it's very quiet under normal operation and is only slightly less efficient than the Enermax. What's more, for this build specifically (and even with another graphics card and few hard drives) 850W is more than enough. Previously we've seen four GTX 295s to almost max out a 1,050W power supply, so 850W is plenty here.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD
(and Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive)
UK Pricing: £273.25 (inc. VAT) and £64.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $385.00 (ex. Tax) and $89.99 (ex. Tax)

How can you improve on a terabyte of speedy mechanical storage? By coupling it with OCZ's speedy Vertex 120GB SSD, that's how! Offering speeds comparable to those (and in some cases faster than) Intel's high end SSDs, but with the added benefit of a reasonable amount of storage space, the OCZ Vertex has really surprised us.

The Indilinx controller chip has allowed OCZ 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 of SSDs based on the JMicron controllers.

Unless you're an obsessive gamer, 120GB will do, although 240GB is more than enough for a boot partition and a healthy stack of games to keep you up all... month, 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 set up which delivers the very best of both worlds. Just hide the bank statement from the missus!

CPU Cooler

First Choice: Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 120mm SSO CPU Cooler
UK Pricing: £51.81 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $74.99 (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, often built too large, too heavy or just too damn noisy.

However, the Noctua NH-U12P manages to achieve both excellent cooling with fantastically quiet performance and excellent thermal results too, making it one of the best heatsinks we’ve ever seen. Despite whispering away at 19dBA thanks to its special SSO bearing fan, the cooler is able to keep even a heavily overclocked Core i7 CPU a full 26°C cooler than an Intel stock cooler.

While there are coolers which perform better thermally, none are able to do so this quietly, and to sweeten the deal even further Nocuta now sells the cooler in a special LGA 1366 bundle with a second NF-P12 cooling fan, which usually sells for £18/$30 on its own! If you’re looking for the complete package of high-end air cooling and excellent acoustic performance (and why wouldn't you be?) the Noctua NH-U12P is one of the best options out there.

Optical Drive

UK First Choice: Samsung SH-S223B/BEBE 22x SATA DVDRW
UK Pricing: £14.67 (inc. VAT)

US First Choice: LITE-ON SATA DVD+RW iHAS124-04
US Pricing: $25.99 (ex Tax)

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.