What Hardware Should I Buy? - July 2009

Case

UK First Choice: Antec Twelve Hundred
UK Pricing: £130.69 (inc. VAT)
US Pricing: $169.99 (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 in this case, its bigger brother, the Antec Tweleve Hundred, for air cooling performance.

Aesthetics are entirely personal, so if you're after a cleaner cut design then Akasa or Lian Li will be more up your street. To keep the potential heavy overclock happy though, we recommend the possibility of maximum airflow for these summer months, which makes the Twelve Hundred ideal.

For a workstation, the possibility of multiple hard drives, a few optical drives or more graphics cards is also an option, so with more space inside the bigger case can accommodate this.

Power supply

UK First Choice: Be Quiet! Dark Power Pro 650W
UK Pricing: £114.48 (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 £110 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: £38.19 (inc. VAT)

If you're not a regular bit-tech reader, 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.

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)

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)

We're still wondering whether to include an SSD in this level of hardware. The performance will certainly warrant it, but we've still yet to test the latest value series from Kingston, Corsair, Samsung and OCZ in order to determine whether they prevent stutter, do they do enough to outpace standard hard drives and is the limited £/GB worth it. For the moment then, we're continuing to recommend the Samsung F1 1TB.

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.