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!

I like Logitech's new mouse along with nearly any other mouse they've released for the last year or so but I'm really getting irritated that there is still no left-handed mouse. No pun intended at for those right-handed. At the time of release for the MX1000 I liked it so much that I forced my left hand to adjust to the contour of the mouse. There is no reason why they can't have a left-handed contoured mouse. There has to be millions of left-handed enthusiasts out there. The only way to push for such a product is through media channels like THG and other hardware related sites. It would be nice if THG would do a poll and find out how many left-handers there are within its audience of readers and how many would favor/purchase a left-handed contoured mouse for the enthusiasts.
 
Sorry for the rant but this is getting old and downright rediculous especially now that there is definitely a market out there. Am I speaking for anyone else? I know there has to be someone who works for THG that is left-handed...speak out! THG has the power to kill a product, you therefore have the power to bring one to life.

 
Some of these less-geeky products are going to be showcased in another installment(which will actually be on DenGuru), as well as the MobilityGuru Holiday Buyers' Guide.  I'm sure your girlfriend appreciates your consideration.  

Yeah, I agree that we need to see more budget parts. After blowing all the $$ on the CPU, memory, motherboard and graphics I find myself unable to buy an expensive LCD or even mouse or cool accessories.
 
BTW nice to see the elf is back and hot as ever.

 
Well, everyone in my family of seven had a PDA or two at one point. Five of us use them now, and only two of us are really tech savvy. The rest can't figure out our home theatre and come to me for computer problems. PDAs aren't that complex. Besides, cell phones are becoming hybrid PDA devices anyways.
 
I do agree with you on the rest, epecially the Sims!

Hmmmm... we're not weird enough to scare away the normal people... looks like I have to try harder here...
 
The 6gb pocket Seagate drive seems like a very nice gizmo, but I have my trusty 8gb mp3 player that can also double as a storage device which works just fine... another thing I would recommend (It was a Creative Zen MicroPhoto, but it's prolly replaced by now... tear) So not only can you listen to music, but you can also store whatever files you want, and change the size of file storage how you want. If your in the market for an mp3 player, than its food for thought.
 
I got 6 external 3.5"" hdd's... Sarah, you can't complain about your single one =P
 
And for the left handed guy here, Logitech doesn't market towards ya'll because ya'll usually die in a scissor mishap every so often    
I keed I keed... nah, I've never used a pure left or right hand mouse. I have a Razer Diamonback and it's ambidextrous, and I thoroughly enjoy it. But if you really need the VX revolutions scroll... shrug, sucks for you.
 
It's alright, I bring the best gifts to people... the gift of HAPPINESS (through my sig of course =P)

Hey guys, this thread and acticle contents say part two, but this is part 3!
 
http://www.tomshardware.com/site/h [..