The second part of our buyers' guide deals with cases, power supplies, and storage and consumer devices.

good stuff! it's always good to come here for recomendations.

I'd comment on Sarah, but i'm afraid someone might have some nasties up their sleeve again... so i'll just give a thumbs up... (Gives thumbs up)

edit: i'm a stranger? what? like...stranger danger?

Sarah? Who is Sarah and why would anyone have some "nasties" up their sleeve about it?
Maybe you are referencing the model?
She does a great job looking enthusiastic about geek stuff ;-)
Some cool stuff in the list!

apparently we are all strangers

With all the controversy surrounding modular power supplies i am a little surprised to see Tom's recommending them...

ahh common!


by the way -
I like the way things are presented, but it seems that the general guideline here is "buy all that is new and expensive" ... so poor people can roll themselves in newspaper and die...

Yeah... the last thread turned out into an uncontrollable snowball straight on the road to hell... anyways...

Imma read the article, and then get back on thoughts and opinions. The first one I agreed with most was sorta lacking, but then again, there's a lot of info to cover. I'll offer some of my own opinions in a sec.

Quick Edit: Looked at the first picture of her holding that heavy PSU by the cords and I feel my heart clenching up... hopefully those things are soldered on very very securely, otherwise if something comes loose and they plug it in...

Final Edit: Alright, went through it, liked most of it, although detail was lacking somewhat. Good article, but I would like to raise a couple points of contention.... the 1kW PSU, I can trust Enermax, but I believe PC P&C are going the right way with their huge 60A 12V rail... Seperate rails has it's place for isolation of individual components, but there are still chances one rail might be overloaded past it's 18A limit, which would pose problems. Having a single 60A rail will ensure that problem won't happen.

The Zalman PSU, haven't heard much about it, but it's probably stable, I would however, recommend the Corsair 620W PSU over it since it repeatedly had great reviews.

Nice choice on cases, the Silverstone is damn huge, never really noticed how bit it is until Sarah (I think thats her name) stood next to it...

Nothing much to comment on mouses, but then we hit storage, and I have my own thoughts on that. For the flash drive:

http://www.sandisk.com/Products/Ca [...] Drive.aspx

I like it a lot, and a lot of other people really find it useful. It's sleek, has decent read/write, good software, but above all, can stand being run over by a car, dropped, or even peed on...

Also, for external drives, it's usually always cheaper to buy the drive itself and then buy an external kit. You then have greater selection of what connection you want (USB, Firewire, or eSATA). For the 3.5" drive, I highly recommend a fan, I have 6 external HDD's running, 4 of them fanless, and I notice the fanless ones are quite a bit hotter than the fanned ones, even if the fan's don't exhaust that much air.

Damn... that was one long post.

very nice. I love the new antec case, great design for a medium price, think i may have to upgrade mine!

I don't get why logitech's new "top of the line" mouse now charges only on a cradle? the G7 trumps it coming with two removable lithium batteries, which are very quick to swap and so you never have to worry about running out of power.

my fav pic is of the crucial USB key, very cute pic. Very nice job again Sarah, and article writers. I love having multiple articles this year, good idea!

There is a little controversy in that modular PSUs may not provide quite as much peak juice as non-modular PSUs. Ooookay, so if you figure you need a 300W standard PSU, get a 350W modular one and then you're golden. The ability to have fewer cables cluttering up a case is a HUGE advantage in my book. I've worked with both regular and modular PSUs and I'd go for modular over standard any day for that reason. The fact that I have a modular PSU (Antec SmartPower 2.0 500W) sitting in my box is testament to that.

I am disappointed at almost all external drive solutions as even in RAID 0 with fast drives on a fast interface like eSATA-150 they can't top 50 MB/sec or so. I could do at least twice that when they're inside the computer. Ditto that if I had a computer with two drives in it sitting on gigabit Ethernet attached as a NAS. I am betting that the hardware inside these boxes splits up the bandwidth of the interface between drives and the little IOPs aren't stout enough to transfer 120 MB/sec. My suggestion to the NAS box makers would be to put something more near a real CPU in power inside one of them to handle all of the I/O and overhead. I'd suggest to the little external drive makers to just use eSATA an an extension cord of sorts- the signal goes straight from motherboard to cable to drive. If you have 2 drives in a box, then have 2 eSATA connectors. Slow external hard drives suck and the only reason to deal with them is if you have a laptop and absolutely no other options.

One thing that I'd change with case/motherboard layouts today is to have all of the power/SATA/IDE/header cables connect on the back side of the board and have the board standoffs be about 1-1.5" long. That way, the cables are all out of the way of working with the board but still accessible by removing the right side panel. You get the advantage of all of your cards and such having no cables in the way and get better airflow. Oh, and it would look much better to those who have windowed cases.

he states right at the start of the article that there will be follow-up articles, one of which will be for those on a budget.

as for psu controversy, THG tested that modular hard drive (I think) in their labs, and after reading their requirements and testing methods, the results are good enough for me! If there is controversy elsewhere that is unfortunate, but their PSU test was so complete I would never hesitate to buy based on it.

It's nice to see Sarah is back presenting cool stuff for us geeks . As someone said it's pretty expensive stuff being presented but hey at least it's free to look ( and that goes for the elf too ) .
By the way in case you're still here with us Sarah , out of all these things you presented what would you take home. Something like the elf recommends , a product that's not only for the geeks .

Tech products that are not just for the geeks would probably be:

1. A laptop
2. Portable music player
3. DVDs and CDs
4. USB memory sticks
5. A good desk and chair (don't underestimate this!!)
6. Cell phone/Blackberry/PDA
7. Flat-panel TV
8. Digital cameras and accessories

Those are the types of things that non-geeks tend to like to get. For example, I'd never consider buying my girlfriend (who's not a geek) something like a RAM upgrade as a present, although I'd gladly take 2 more sticks of 1GB DDR 400. But she did like the printer/scanner combo that I got her as she was tired of having to go somewhere to have things printed off for her. You more have to think of the person that you're shopping for. In general, women tend to like jewelry and clothes quite a bit and guys tend to have extremely varied likes.

EDIT: Dependent on the person, a nice bottle of a potent potable might also go over very well. I know a couple of people that a 30-year-old bottle of Scotch or a particularly nice bottle of wine would make their day.

Haha. Both are on my Christmas list this year. No other hardware as I just upgraded and will wait for my birthday.

Haven't read the article yet. I'll be back...

Uh.. blackberry/PDA would be pretty complicated for non-geeky people, buisness majors and road-warriors might like them, but not for most people. A nice pretty cellphone however, is a nice one.

Don't forget music player accessories, webcam's (even better if you have a girlfriend ) larger LCD monitors, and The SIMS!

I'm still around! Now, this is a fun question to answer. I think of all the products showcased (for this installment of the Buyers' Guide, anyway) the one I would take home would be the Seagate 6GB Pocket Hard Drive. Although I work for Tom's Hardware, and for the most part understand what all this stuff is, I'm no enthusiast like you all (although I can respect it, of course). Plus, I only use notebooks, so many of these things would be useless to me. The accessories I use most are my little USB thumb drive (2GB) and my card reader (reads 9 different kinds of cards). I like taking pictures & often need to take them with me, so this comes in handy. But having 6GB would give me extra space, so not only could it hold photos, but music, important documents, etc. So at the same time providing a backup solution. I do have a 500GB External Hard Drive for backing up, but it's so big and bulky and quite honestly I don't have that much data!