Hot Hardware Holiday Buyer's Guide 2006
Flagship System Continued
Flagship System Configuration Continued...
Hard Drive - 2 x Western Digital 150GB Raptor
Building on top of an already legendary drive, Western Digital has refreshed the ever-popular 10,000rpm Raptor hard drives with a large 16MB cache and raised capacities from 74GB up to a much more useful 150GB. Creating a RAID array with these two drives will offer some of the fastest drive performance money can buy. By significantly lowering read and write times, the use of such a potent array of drives will reduce the amount of time it takes for games and applications to load. In short, you'll be able to spend less time looking at a boring load screen and more time racking up headshots in your favorite first-person shooter.
Sound Card - Creative Labs X-Fi Elite Pro
Going above and beyond Creative's standard X-Fi series, the flagship X-Fi Elite Pro utilizes higher quality DAC's (Digital-to-Analog Converters) to offer the highest possible performance in the product family. Although a few improvements have been made, the X-Fi Elite Pro still retains the 24-bit Crystalizer, CMSS-3D surround, and 3DMIDI functionality which X-Fi sound cards are famous for. In addition, this premium model also incorporates 64MB of X-Ram onboard audio memory for increased framerates and audio performance in the few games that support it. Rounding out an already impressive product is a breakout box to provide users with unparalleled functionality and convenience.
Power Supply - PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1kW-SR
With the latest flagship components including a quad-core processor and two cutting-edge graphics cards demanding a large amount of power, we opted to settle for nothing short of 1,000W of power for the PSU of our flagship system. Although one of the priciest brands on the market, PC Power & Cooling are renowned for offering exceptional products which are able to handle extreme loads without fail. The Turbo-Cool 1kW-SR combines the stellar reliability and stability the company is famous for with an unbelievable 1kW output for the ultimate PSU money can buy. Although there are cheaper options, none will offer the piece of mind and derive the same amount of envy from friends as the PC Power & Cooling Turbo-Cool 1kW-SR.
