Print
There’s no need to pay more for a solid enclosure
There are people who say that the case doesn’t matter, that the sweet spot for cases is “as cheap as you can possibly get.” These people are bad and they should feel bad. The sweet spot for cases is right around $100. At $100, you can get a great mid-tower or full-tower case with solid build quality, plenty of fans or fan mounting options, front-panel USB 3.0, toolless drive bays, and a nice paint job. Below that you’ll sacrifice build quality or looks, and above that you start getting fancy, with water-cooling mounts, support for giant motherboards or a half-dozen fans, or premium materials, but $100 will get you a case with good air cooling that you can be proud of.
Our favorite cases at $100 are the Fractal Design Define R4 and the NZXT Phantom 410. The Define R4 is the more flexible of the two. It’s more of a silent PC by design, with its acoustic foam on the inside of the side panels and its unused fan holes covered with sound-damping material until removed to add fans. The Phantom 410 looks stunning, especially in red or gray, and comes with much more fan support and more fans, flat out.
These aren’t the only cases at $100 and below that are worthy of consideration, but they’re two of our favorite mid-towers and they both happen to be around the $100 sweet spot.
The sweet place to be is in dual-channel mode
How much RAM do you need, how many channels, and what speed? From our experience, and based on today’s RAM prices and capacities, we recommend 8GB of DDR3/1600. Everyone knows that 2GB is not enough RAM today. And while 4GB is OK, why stop there when 8GB isn’t much more? At press time, 8GB of DDR3/1600 fetched roughly $40 while 4GB is about $30.
Should you buy more RAM than that? Only you can answer that question. If your applications are RAM hogs or you tend to multitask, additional RAM can’t hurt.
8GB is truly the new 4GB when it comes to RAM.
There’s one more pesky problem, though: How many memory channels do you really need? Is it worth paying the extra surcharge for a quad-channel setup or is dual-channel enough? To find out, we took our trusty LGA2011-based zero-point, set it to bone-stock clock speed and tested it with 8GB of DDR3/1333 in quad-channel, dual-channel, and, well, single-channel, using various benchmarks. Some of the benchmarks are GPU-limited and others are CPU-limited to make a point that memory bandwidth won’t make a difference in many of your applications. Stepping from quad to dual doesn’t hurt much, but going to single will definitely take a bite out of performance, although not as much as you would suspect. In fact, upping the memory speed from DDR3/1333 to DDR3/1866 actually erased the difference in the apps that seem to like bandwidth the most: encoding.
Why does memory bandwidth make nary a difference in the vast majority of apps? Thank the huge caches in today’s CPUs. The only time you really want to go all-out on memory bandwidth is when you’re intending to game with integrated graphics.
| Quad-Channel | Dual-Channel | Single-Channel | |
| 3DMark 11 overall | X5,794 | X5,764 | X5,634 |
| x264 5.0 HD Pass 1 (fps) | 85.8 | 83.4 | 74.4 |
| x264 5.0 HD Pass 2 (fps) | 19 | 18.9 | 18.8 |
| SiSoft Sandra (GB/s) | 34.2 | 17.6 | 9.0 |
| Stitch.Efx (sec) | 906 | 898 | 919 |
| ProShow Producer 5.0 (sec) | 1,553 | 1,586 | 1,732 |
| Cinebench 11.5 | 10.2 | 10.2 | 10.02 |
We used an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard, 8GB of DDR3/1333, GeForce GTX 690, OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional for testing both CPU configurations.We used an Asus Sabertooth X79 motherboard, 8GB of DDR3/1333, GeForce GTX 690, OCZ Vertex 3 SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional for testing both CPU configurations.
The best cooler-for-the-coin we’ve ever tested
There are many unsolved mysteries in life, such as who built the pyramids, where socks go during laundry, and how is it possible that the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo costs only $35. It just doesn’t make any sense. This simple cooling device has bested the majority of our skyscraper coolers since it was reviewed in January 2012, and yet it has cost less than almost every single one of its competitors, making it a rare gem in the world of PC components.
What about water cooling? We’re not going to go there, simply because even though the all-in-one designs have radically simplified the installation and maintenance of cooling loops, their price-to-performance ratio is still not as good as what’s available from a solid air cooler. In fact, in some cases the bigger air coolers perform better than their liquid brethren while costing less, so the sweet spot for now is definitely on dry land.
| CM Hyper 212 Evo | Xigmatek Aegir | Noctua DH-14 | Corsair H100 LCS | |
| Price | $35 | $60 | $85 | $115 |
| Ambient Air | 23.8 | 24.8 | 25.2 | 25 |
| Idle Temperature | 36.2 | 33.8 | 34.1 | 33.2 |
| Burn Temperature | 74 | 71 | 72.3 | 69.2 |
| Temp Delta (Burn minus idle) | 37.8 | 37.2 | 41.1 | 36 |
All temperatures in degrees Celsius. Best scores bolded. All tests performed using an Intel Core i7-3960 at 4.2GHz, on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard with 16GB DDR3/1600, in a Thermaltake Level 10 GT with stock fans set to High.
Buy just enough PSU for your needs
Our normal advice for an enthusiast constructing a system is to think long term, overbuild because you don’t know what parts your machine will end up with, and consider how hard your PSU is working on those sweltering days of summer. And if we were making a recommendation for someone using our guidelines, we’d say buy a Corsair TX 750 V2 or Thermaltake Smart 730. Both are about $100, give you a nice long five-year warranty, and offer four 6+2 connectors for future beefy-GPU support.
Click the next page to see what all these components look together in one box.
Comments are closed on this article
davelray
February 11, 2013 at 9:55pm
Warrior is just smoking his usual console crack. You can generally ignore him and his anti-PC attitude.
kelton312
February 12, 2013 at 9:22am
Looked through his reply history and it's laughable how hard he tries to spread misinformation on a PC site. Sounds like he tried and failed to build a PC at one point in time and made it his personal life goal to keep others from making the same mistake.
joshnorem
February 12, 2013 at 8:07am
You can just download OSes now and put them on a USB drive, so we rarely use them.
Hagame
February 14, 2013 at 9:39am
I agree. I have loaded multiple linux distros on to my PC's using a flash drive. And now, in the future, I fully expect optical drives to become obsolete much like floppy drives did, back in the day.
jeffhex
February 11, 2013 at 7:04pm
I used to own a BP6 (along with several other Abit mobos). Whatever happened to them after the bad capacitors fiasco?
Actually, looking at the list of sweet spot hall-of-famers, I'm surprised how many I owned over the years.
