What Hardware Should I Buy? - July 2009

Memory

First Choice: 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1,600MHz DDR3
UK Pricing: £67.68 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $64.99 (ex. Tax)

The bare minimum of memory you should be putting into a high-end PC is 4GB, and since we're pairing it with an AMD AM3 CPU and motherboard, we've got to go for DDR3. These 1,600MHz kits afford tons of performance potential for overclocking, and are the best value we could find (the OCZ is available in the US too, but for $10 more). Both come pre-fitted with stylish heatspreaders allowing you to push your RAM that little bit faster if you wish.

While DDR2 is certainly cheaper, we wouldn't recommend any AMD AM2+ motherboards so DDR3 is by default the way to go.

Case

First Choice: Cooler Master HAF 922
UK Pricing: £84.77 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $129.99 (ex. Tax)

There's really not much between the HAF922 and Antec 902 we've been recommending for the last few months, aesthetic choices aside. Both have an unparalleled build quality, offer oodles of airflow for the extra heat overclocking generates and generally are great cases to work with.

The 922 is smaller than the 932, making it far more manageable to carry or store into a corner, but the case is slightly longer and wider than the 902 - meaning when larger footlong graphics cards arrive (and they will!) the HAF will have to space for them. Another thing the HAF 922 has to its advantage is price - at £85 it better fits our budgets compared to the £95-£100 Antec 902.

Power supply

UK First Choice: OCZ ModXStream Pro 500W
UK Pricing: £56.25 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $79.99 (ex. Tax)

500W should be all that's needed for this build, even with an overclocked multicore CPU and Radeon HD 4870 1GB graphics card, there is still enough connectors for the card and a few hard drives, and we've in our review tested the ModXStream Pro over an extended period of high load to find it was still quiet and stable. As much as we like PSUs like the be quiet Dark Power Pro 650W - it's nearly twice the price - making the ModXStream Pro a very attractive option. If you feel the need to jump up to 600W even, it's only £65, so still offers a clear saving.

Note that the 500W doesn't offer any capacity for mutli-GPU though, but nor does the motherboard and we wouldn't recommend it either - stick to a single card for maximum all round performance gains for the cash.

CPU Cooler

UK First Choice: Titan Fenrir
UK Pricing: £38.19 (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/SCANG-1000
US Pricing: $38.49 (ex. Tax)

Titan isn't yet selling its coolers in the USA, but Scythe's Kama Angle/SCANG-1000 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 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)

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 Sourceforge.

Hard Disk Drive

First Choice: Samsung Spinpoint F1 1TB Hard Disk Drive
UK Pricing: £64.99 (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 £65! 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.