![[H]ardOCP](/images/blank.gif){kind=small}
- Date:
- Wednesday, November 30, 2005
- Author:
- Keith Dugger
- Editor:
- Kyle Bennett
- Google +1
[H] Holiday System Guide - 2005
As the 2005 holiday season is near, we dug deep into our holiday cheer and came up with a Newegg four-way system buying guide. We applied $500 and $1000 to upgrade systems and $1200 and $2000 to full systems for both AMD and Intel-based purchases.
Full Systems – Common Components - $1200
The following components were used in both the AMD and Intel full systems to round out the guide.
Case
We moved to a Thermaltake case for this guide. Thermaltake was founded in 1999 and produces chip coolers, power supplies, and cases among other things. Thermaltake cases have been the foundation of many enthusiasts’ system builds over the past few years and we’ve used them in quite a few projects as well.
The Soprano is a sleek, piano black case with practically tool-free installation. The case includes highly efficient and quiet cooling to satisfy most of our needs. A case choice is typically very personal; we just wanted to show another great selection from a good company.
Thermaltake Soprano Newegg Link
Power Supply
The power supply is sometimes overlooked when designing a new system, but the PSU often provides a core of stability to the computer. There are many adequate power supplies from the top three manufacturers, but we’ve never had a single issue with any model from Antec.
We start by looking for models with dual 12V power rails to support any current of future needs. We then turn to performance and noise. For this series, we have chosen the Antec TruePower II 550W unit. This is a quiet and cool supply and meets our selection criteria.
Antec 550W Dual 12V PSU Newegg Link
Video Card
The new Geforce 6800GS is a terrific product especially for the price point. At around $200, the eVGA model offers 256MB of GDDR3 memory and supports the PCI Express x16 bus. This card will easily replace the niche that the 6600GT has filled for the past year. With a full 12 pixel pipelines, a core clock of 425MHz, and a memory clock of 1GHz, the 6800GS is in the same performance field as some top of the line cards a year ago.
Hard Drives
By choosing two hard drives of equal size, our systems have the option to run in a RAID 0 stripe for performance should you choose. These Western Digital drives are fast offering 16MB of cache and SATA 3.0Gb/s support. The average seek time is 8.9ms and the average latency is 4.2ms. This is getting close to speeds achieved by Western Digital’s own 10K RPM Raptors.
Plus, Western Digital still offers a three year warranty.
(2) Western Digital 250GB Newegg Link
Optical Drive
We’ve picked the same optical drive from our last guide. The Plextor PX-740A/SW-BL is one feature rich combination drive. It can write at the following technologies and speeds:
DVD+R (16X); DVD+RW (8X); DVD-R (16X); DVD-RW (4X); CD-R (48X); CD-RW (32X); DVD+R DL (8X); and DVD-R DL (4X).
Supporting all those technologies at terrific speeds puts this list on the top of our optical drive wish list. Its double layer support offers some amount of future-proofing.
Plextor Black PX-740A (Dual Layer) Newegg Link