What Hardware Should I Buy? - May 2009

Memory

First Choice: 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz/PC2-8500 CL5
UK Pricing: £43.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $49.99 (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. All we check for is consistency in memory timings - in this case 5-5-5-15 at 1,066MHz/PC2-8500, and that the branded manufacturer offers a lifetime warranty. This month we found Kingston in the UK and G.Skill in the States to be cheapest for a 4GB kit so we're going with them, however since memory prices fluctuate daily - keep checking around to pick up the best deal on the day you buy.

While you can get 4GB 800MHz/PC2-6400 DDR2 kits for around £5 less, the extra fiver for what is noticeably quicker ram makes sense, especially as it'll help when it comes to overclocking the CPU, giving you that little bit of extra overhead. Even if you don't plan on overclocking, the slight improvement over slower memory is definitely worth the small extra outlay - just make sure you're running a 64-bit OS like Windows Vista Home Premium to make use of more than 3GB of system memory!

Case

UK First Choice: Akasa Omega
UK Pricing: £109.19 (inc. VAT)

US First Choice: Cooler Master HAF 932
US Pricing: $139.99 (ex. Tax)

Even if you're a casual bit-tech reader, you'll know there's not much that matches the mighty Antec Nine Hundred (or its bigger brother, the Antec Tweleve Hundred) for air cooling performance. However, we think there's a whole lot more to choosing a case than pure cooling performance, which is why we've selected the Akasa Omega here. Its twin 120mm cooling fans are enough to keep your system cool while running wonderfully quietly and the black aluminium construction makes sure the Omega is wonderfully solid and hard wearing.

The large removable motherboard board section, which includes all the expansion card slots, makes building your system brilliantly easy. What's more, the flexible cooling system, which includes twin mounts for 2x120mm watercooling radiators, means the quiet stock cooling solution can be simply upgraded.

It also looks great too, with clean lines and a curved aluminium plated door making it a much more stylish choice than either of Antec's high airflow monsters. Unfortunately though it isn't available Stateside, which means our American friends looking for a more understated case will have to look elsewhere: The newly launched Antec P183 (review soon) should fit the bill, although it lacks watercooling support and is a lot more cramped than the Omega.

Power supply

UK First Choice: Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W
UK Pricing: £105.56 (inc. VAT)

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

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 - at a shade over £100 it is admittedly a lot to pay for a 650W power supply but in this case you genuinely do get what you pay for. 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.

CPU Cooler

UK First Choice: Titan Fenrir
UK Pricing: £33.34 (inc. VAT)

We doubt you'll have heard of the Titan Fenrir before, coming as it does from Titan, a unknown cooling brand here in Europe. However, this quad heatpipe direct contact cooler has proven itself incredibly capable following extensive testing here in our labs, with thermal performance which (whisper it) can rival that of a Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme. We'll have a full review on bit-tech soon.

It's worth noting that the included PWM fan is very noisy when turned up to full whack so we'd recommend running the fan at the lowest speed, sacrificing cooling ability for a much more sedate noise level. It's not as silent as dedicated low noise coolers like those from Austrian manufacturer Noctua though, so if absolute silence is what you're after, you should look elsewhere.

For a combination of performance and silence though, the Titan Fenrir is an extremely capable heatsink, and is helped by the inclusion of mounting brackets for AM2, LGA 775 and LGA 1366, making it a great choice no matter what your CPU.

US First Choice: Scythe Kama Angle
US Pricing: $38.99

Titan isn't yet selling its coolers in the USA, but Scythe's Kama Angle is an equally good choice if you happen to live on the other side of the Atlantic. While Scythe's coolers have been very hit or miss for us here at bit-tech, our friends over at Custom PC rave to us about the Kama Angle CPU cooler, which at under $40, is both well priced and well featured, with secure and easy to use mountings for both AMD and Intel CPUs.

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.

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: Sony Optiarc SATA DVD+RW AD-7240S-0B
US Pricing: $23.99 (ex Tax)

There's no need to go nuts when it comes to DVD-RW drives and you can pick up perfectly capable drives for around £15, although we do insist on SATA ones, if only to banish those messy IDE ribbon cables. These basic drives are affordable for a reason though, so 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: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £62.04 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $89.99 (ex. Tax)

A little over 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 an incredible £62! The performance of this 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 support this feature.