What Hardware Should I Buy? - October 2009

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When only the best will do, there’s a raft of hardware out there to cater for your needs, providing premium performance for a premium price tag. Without going crazy and losing our heads, we've really gone to town to maximise this set up because even with a high budget, we’re not out to waste money, and building a top-end system isn’t as simple as just buying the most expensive components out there.

We’ve had to remove our long favoured Swiftech water-cooling kit due to its mysterious disappearance from e-tailers' stock rooms. You can of course sub in your own water-cooling parts, but few kits off the ease and simplicity of setup of the Swiftech, so we’ve switched to standard air-cooling kit for this month.

While we're keen to point out that top-end hardware depreciates in value fairly rapidly, the sound card and SSD should last into future upgrades, so they can certainly be thought of as an investment for the future. In addition, as the SSD is bought directly from Crucial, any RMA situations are likely to be resolved fairly quickly. Buying hardware direct from the manufacturer is great, because they can't pass the buck and won't bounce you round various departments before agreeing to replace your faulty product.

Furthermore, Crucial has ranked highly in reader satisfaction surveys over the past few years. Enter this year's customer satisfaction survey to let us know how all the resellers and manufacturers you've bought from this year have fared, and for a chance to win £600 worth of hardware.

If you’ve just bought that 24in or 30in monitor, surround sound speaker kit and nice comfy leather chair with foot rest (usually called the sub) and are looking for some kick-ass performance that won't wait for anyone, this is what we consider the very best hardware at the moment.


UK Price | US Price: AMD Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5

AMD's latest performance graphics card is a single GPU monster. Because we eschew dual-GPU solutions whenever possible, the HD 5870 makes perfect sense, and for a nose under £300 it's not obscenely priced either. With it you get future DirectX 11 support when Windows 7 arrives later this month, as well as an incredibly low idle power and other architectural advancements you can read about in our Tim-depth guide and performance review.

However, while it’s the top card right now, we are still waiting for Nvidia to show its DirectX11 card later this year, so some may want to hold off for now. However, the HD 5870 is an undoubtedly powerful single GPU card and the gauntlet has been firmly thrown down for Nvidia to respond. If you have to have the biggest, fastest, most future proof graphics card in the room though, only the HD 5870 will do.

UK Price | US Price: Intel Core i7 920 (D0)

The Core i7 920 (d0 stepping) is still the performance value part to buy. Again. Forget the more expensive 950/960/975 parts, because the 920 will hit a happy ~4GHz on the Asus P6T Deluxe V2 suggested which, combined with eight threads and plenty of cache makes it a performance beast that'll cruise through any task.

UK Price | US Price: Asus P6T Deluxe V2

The V2 lacks the silly SAS ports the original model has, but it still incorporates a rock solid build quality and fantastic performance and overclocking potential. Coupled with six memory slots and future 6-core CPU support (we anticipate), it offers plenty of upgrade potential for the future. Asus' P6T Deluxe series has consistently been recommended by bit-tech and Custom PC since its launch a year ago, proving that Asus got this one right.

UK Price | US Price: OCZ/Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) 1,600MHz Cl9 DDR3 kit

We've used the same 6GB kit from the previous build here too. It's not particularly high performance but DDR3 memory prices have gone up considerably since our last buyer's guide so we've opted for something a little cheaper: it's not like Core i7 is starved of memory bandwidth after all. If you have a favourite supplier or spot a good deal, don't be afraid to substitute it in here.

UK Price | US Price: Cooler Master ATCS 840

With all this premium kit, you'll want a case that looks suitably impressive, and we're big fans of the Cooler Master ATCS 840. It's got the space inside to comfortably house all our high end bits, while the exterior is sleek and elegant. Its stock cooling is both effective and pleasingly quiet, and there’s plenty of flexibility in the design for you to add almost any hardware configuration you can imagine, with plenty of provisioning for watercooling mounts too.

UK Price | US Price: Seasonic M12D 850W PSU

The Seasonic M12D 850W PSU, which gives a great balance between powerful 12V rails, quietness and value. While we think highly of the Enermax Revolution 85+ 850W PSU, its £170 inc VAT price can't quite match the equally excellent Seasonic M12D 850W. Buying either would be an excellent purchase, though.

UK Price| US Price: : Titan Fenrir TTC-NK85TZ

We've gone back to air cooling this month for two reasons: one, there's no watercooling block yet for the Radeon HD 5870, and two, Swiftech stopped selling its awesome watercooling kit! Silly blighters! The Titan Fenrir takes the reins then, and for just £25 it's an awesomely inexpensive alternative until we find something a bit more hardcore.

UK Price| US Price: : Asus Xonar DX Sound card

Throw in a quality, PCI-Express soundcard such as the Asus Xonar D2X and there's perfect-pitch audio to match the power of the system as a whole. Despite on-board audio reaching such a level that it's suitable for the vast majority of us, if you're dropping one and a half grand on a hardcore PC, there's a strong likelihood you'll also want to balance it with a tasty audio setup. Be sure to keep in mind the Xonar Essence STX as well if you need coaxial connectors instead of 3.5mm audio jacks.

UK Price | US Price: Crucial CT128M225 128GB SSD
UK Price | US Price: Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB hard disk

The case has also got plenty of room to house the two storage devices we'd recommend - the Crucial CT128M225 SSD and the 1TB Samsung SpinPoint F3 - plus any other disks you might want to carry over from your current build. The Crucial SSD is a bargain-hunter's dream, as while it's based on the same Indilinx drive controller as the brilliant OCZ Vertex, Crucial has foregone the pricey aluminium housing in favour of cheaper plastic. That doesn't make a difference to the product unless you care for bling.

If you're going to tuck the drive away in a bay (or an SSD caddy) anyway, you can get a fast drive for less cash - what's not to like about that?

UK Price | US Price: LG GH22NS50 SATA DVDRW

Finally, there's a SATA DVD drive. While it's tempting to add a Blu-ray drive to any expensive PC, only movies are distributed on Blu-ray, and you'll want to watch these on a super-quiet media PC hooked up to a large HD telly, rather than monster PC with a comparatively small 24in or 30in screen. The only reason you'd want to add a Blu-ray drive to a powerful PC is to let you rip Blu-ray films, and as that's illegal, we know you definitely won't be doing that, hence the standard DVD drive recommendation.