What Hardware Should I Buy? - March 2009

Memory

First Choice: Corsair XMS2 4GB kit (2x2GB) PC2-6400 CAS5
UK Pricing: £34.09 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $54.99 (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, especially in the majority of modern games. This 800MHz/PC2-6400 kit from Corsair is well priced at less than £40 and is 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 a good £80+ for elaborate OCZ Reaper or Platinum, Geil, G.Skill or Corsair DHX for example.

Case

First Choice: Antec P182
UK Pricing: £106.98 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $129.99 (ex. Tax)

Or

First Choice: Antec Nine Hundred Two
UK Pricing: £99.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $159.99 (ex. Tax)

We’ve thought long and hard about this recommendation following our review of the excellent Antec Nine Hundred Two last month and we really can’t decide between the 902 and our other much loved high end case, the Antec P182. Although both are based on designs well over 18 months old, they’re both superb examples of chassis design catering slightly different to different needs.

While the 902 offers superb cooling performance and a wonderful feature set including individually adjustable fans, well made removable dust filters and a modular drive bay system we have to admit it’s not the most attractive case on the market and for many will be far too aggressive and industrial in its appearance to earn a place on your desk.

Comparatively the P182 doesn’t have the cooling horsepower of the 902, but more than makes up for it with much classier looks and handy inclusions like an excellent 270° hinged door and a great compartmentalised interior.

Both cases offer the usual ultra high standards of build quality we’ve come to expect from Antec’s products and both are similarly priced at around £100, so it really does come down to personal preference. If pure cooling is your goal then the 902 is the choice but if its looks aren’t to your taste then the P182 is almost as good while sporting some equally innovative features all of its own.

Power supply

UK First Choice: Be Quiet Dark Power Pro 650W
UK Pricing: £104.99 (inc. VAT)

The Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W just amazed us with its performance when we reviewed it back in July 2008, demonstrating supreme efficiency and genuinely silent running, making it our personal PSU of choice by a long way.

The secret to its whisper quiet operation is down to a fluid bearing fan which keeps the PSU cool whilst spinning at the lowest of speeds and the use of modular cabling only sweetens the deal, helping you to cut down on unwanted cables inside your case

Unfortunately the price might be a sticking point for some - over £90 is admittedly a lot to pay for a 650W power supply but in this case you genuinely do get what you pay. If you can stretch for the Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W we'd strongly recommend you do – it’s a truly superb product backed up by a three year warranty.

US First Choice: Corsair TX650W
US Pricing: $99.99 (ex. Tax)

Sadly Be Quiet! doesn't sell its excellent PSUs in the USA, but this Corsair TX650W is a great alternative. OK, it has no modular connectors but it's one of the cheapest, highest quality PSUs out there for under a hundred bucks. We loved the TX750W and there's no reason why we shouldn't recommend the 650W which provides more than ample power for the setup we've spec'd here.

CPU Cooler

UK First Choice: Scythe Kama Angle
UK Pricing: £29.74 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $38.99 (ex. Tax)

While Scythe has been very hit or miss for us here at bit-tech, our friends over at CustomPC rave to us about the Kama Angle CPU cooler so we felt the need to include it. At under £30, it's well priced and while the Akasa Nero we recently reviewed is cheaper and also has an excellent repertoire, unlike its well fitted LGA1366 mount, the LGA775 mounting is simply terrible. In comparison the Kama Angle works well with both LGA1366 and LGA775, and is highly recommended by the CPC team.

As much as we love the monsters of air cooling like the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme, realistically you won’t need any more cooling than the Kama Angle can provide, and the fact that it’s able to accomplish it both quietly and affordably makes it even more commendable. Get one.

Optical Drive

UK First Choice: Samsung TS-H653B 20X Black SATA DVD+RW Dual Layer Bare Drive
UK Pricing: £14.99 (inc. VAT)

US First Choice: Lite-On IHAS422-0 DVD±RW
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 [eurlhttp://sourceforge.net/]Sourceforge[/eurl].

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £79.91 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $99.99 (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 a little over £75! 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 programmes over smaller disks and even versus competing 1TB drives.

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 file hoarder or have a bigger collection of games than Joe.

However, do be wary that having one terabyte of your precious data on just one disk leaves you very 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: all of the motherboards we've recommended both support this feature.