What Hardware Should I Buy? - April 2009

Memory

First Choice: Corsair XMS2 4GB kit (2x2GB) 1,066MHz/PC2-8500 XMS2 Memory
UK Pricing: £42.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $59.00 (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 1,066MHz/PC2-8500 kit from Corsair is brilliantly priced at just over £40 and is pre-fitted with Corsair’s XMS2 heatspreaders allowing you to push your RAM that little bit faster if you wish.

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

First Choice: Akasa Omega
UK Pricing: £114.99 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: N/A

Even if you're a casual bit-tech reader, you'll know there's not much that match 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 removal motherboard board section, which includes all the expansion card slots, makes building your system brilliantly easy, and the flexible cooling system, including 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 State-side, 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: £105.62 (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 - 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. 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 set up we've spec'd here.

CPU Cooler

UK First Choice: Scythe Kama Angle
UK Pricing: £31.04 (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 Custom PC 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 Pricing: £74.75 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $115.29 (ex. Tax)

If you're looking to put your PC at the heart of your home media, or want to get the best cinema experience from your high-resolution display and 7.1 surround sound you really should consider grabbing yourself a Blu-ray drive, especially as they're now surprisingly affordable. This model 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, although again,playback software isn't included.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £78.07 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $99.99 (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 a little over £75! 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 both support this feature.