Hardware What Hardware Should I Buy? - Nov 2008

Thanks for this, I'll be buying my new rig in January, so this guide will be incredibly helpful then.....

 

Just to point out -- there's no point in recomending anything other than the Intel SSD at the moment - the rest all fail under slightly greater than small I/O and the wait times to write rocket up.. not something you want really. The Intel one, even though it suffers from the same issue, it doesn't suffer anywher near as bad

 

I just want to thank you for putting this together, it saves a lot of searching and more importantly ... I trust your recomendations

 

With anything over a budget box I strongly recommend two hard drives for data security, even if you don't RAID1 and just copy to the second drive in between "proper" backing up to DVD. A couple of 640Gb at £50 each would be my choice for the higher end system.

 

The budget CPU cooler is available for £10.87 on ebuyer if you go for the unlighted fan.

Great resource, just used it to spec out an upgrade after my X1950 Pro AGP died. Decided to bite the bullet and go the whole hog and do a full upgrade.

 

I've not read the article yet, but thank you for making this a regular artcile at Bit-Tech - it is most helpful!!

 

Same comment as I made last month - swap the Pioneer BluRay reader for this LG HD multiformat drive: http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4XKQ Same price as your choice, but also adds in HD-DVD capability. And seeing as HD-DVDs are so cheap right now (£3 a title from HMV.com) its a sensible choice for anyone wanting 1080p movie playback on their PC.

 

Why no Blu-Ray burners?

Just a quick comment about the premium hardware recommendations. I'm a bit surprised that something like a Blu-Ray burner was not recommended, even as an alternate selection. With the new Sony and Buffalo drives out, the overall speed of backup of 50GB of data easily surpasses that of any DVD backup (of course the media costs are quite a bit higher, but how much time does it take to make a backup of ~600 albums encoded in flac on a Blu-Ray setup vs. that of a DVD setup?, it's a no brainer for relatively quick archival of large generally stagnant data). While a burner is quite a bit more expensive than a reader, it is not outrageous, and for those with a large volume of media files (video or music or photos that deserve to be archived) its hard to argue against writeable Blu-Ray as being a huge step up from DVD. Blu-Ray players are much less compelling for those that are not building a media player setup, which these recommendations do not address. If nothing else a burner should be listed as an alternate selection for premium hardware.

Otherwise a nice selection of hardware, particularly at the lower end. I never considered the EP31, but for 32 bit systems it looks to be quite a value. I second the comment on having two drives and would also suggest a UPS for higher end systems.

 

+1 I'm really glad you guys decided to make this a regular. It helps out sooo much and thanks for listing US final prices as well. You guys ROCK!

 

Great article once again and I agree with Leitchy and Thacrudd.
This really makes me want a new graphics card... I hate you.

 

those cases in the premium end, in my mind for sheer class the lian li wins hands down, simple looks but beautifully finished, the antec just looks cluttered with the air vents on top, that pop usb/audio thing on top and then the cover for the front fan being outset from the rest. Whilst i always get the feeling that bit tech favour antec everytime, in a contest where you have to look at something for several hours everyday (due to the notable size of each of these bohemoth cases) i just cant see why someone would want the antec, even for the few extra degrees cooling it gives.

oh to have the doller to go splash out on a premium end pc that includes those items mentioned in the article, that would be faaaaaaaaantastic!

peace

fatman

 

Nice article. Have started pointing friends looking for buying advice to these articles.
Went for the gtx260 myself over the ati 4870 despite paying a little extra, as benchmarks showed it to have higher minimum framerates in the games I value/prefer.

 

Any possibility of dropping in a recomendation for AM2 compatable coolers for the low and mid range? Maybe in the alternative section, you cover the processors but leave no recomendation of what to strap onto them.

 

backup to DVD - 4 cents per gigabyte and you have to swap disks every 4.3gb.
backup to blu-ray - 35 cents per gigabyte you have to swap disks every 25gb.
backup to hard drive - 12 cents per gigabyte and never have to swap disks, plus you preserve your folder structure and keep your flexibility. you are financially better off to have 3 500gb disks in raid5 AND an external copy on a 1TB disk than you are backing up 1TB onto blu-ray disks.

 

In the mid system maybe, or a 640 and a Terabyte. The terabyte disks offer undeniable value for money at just £20-30 more for ~360GB.

LOL no actually we were complaining about other people being Antec fanboys earlier today - Aesthetics are purely personal - we rate cases on functionality, build quality, cooling and design. Li-li are great, but their build quality has dropped several points in the last year imo. Antecs have generally great build quality, a good price and good design, yet Cooler Master have really pulled up their game in the last 6-12 months too making some awesome cases.

Blu-ray burners - no demand for them, generally high cost of backups and slow write time. One 50GB BD-R disk versus two/three 500/640GB/terabyte drives in RAID1/5? There are about 500 ways to do data backup - we could include tape, SAN, buying into Cloud storage, NAS - too many to list.

Valver - Again good call, sorry we missed it again!!

I haven't heard this at all before, the Seagate CEO mentioned something like it this, this afternoon, however I mostly put it down to PR against competitors product. We'll look into it, however you can't deny the theory of performance and zero access times are certainly appealing.

We'll be reviewing SSDs later this month and we will certainly test this.

 

I'm a little annoyed that this still doesn't list US options for CPU cooler to go with the "Affordable" system, or CPU cooler or power supply for the "High-end" system. The summary tables at the beginning of each section make this more obvious with the "N/A" cells.

 

you only recommended the normal gtx260? what's wrong with the Maxcore version? it's similar price or a £10 extra for OC versions, while beating the ATI card in most games (except GRiD and Source engine).

another vote says p182 have dust filters. at least my one only costed £86 from OCuk a year ago have dust filters.

 

Blu-Ray writeable disks are up to 50GB now. I have a RAID 5 NAS with 4 1TB drives as backup (and another NAS as a backup of the primary NAS with 4 300GB drives), however a NAS is not archival storage. Blu-Ray is much closer to archival. With ~200GB in flac files, that is 4 Blu-Ray disks. On DVD, that'd be closer to 45-50 disks and a huge pile of time swapping, labeling, and storing that number of items. DVD as a storage medium for large file types is a dead end. Jpgs and RAW camera files are similar, I've got well over 100GB of these files in under a year of DSLR use, Blu-Ray is a far superior solution for archival storage of large numbers of large sized files.

 

Wouldn't the Antec Sonata Plus 550 which comes with a modular Antec Neo HE 550 (good for 650Watts) be a better choice for budget case?

yes it is 10-20quid more but get a higher quality sleek silent case with modular higher output psu with 83-88% efficientcy.

 

100GB of shots from ONE YEAR of photography.

Jeez. I take photos every single day and my work folder of 4 years old is 20GB.

BD-Rs last as long as CD/DVDRs - 5-10 years in a cool dry place. If you want archival then you want Chrome Oxide tape drives.

Your archiving needs are quite obsessive I have to say. A good server with a good controller + RAID 6 + spare would have cost you just as much.