Power And Optical Drive
Non-modular power supplies often offer a great amount of power for the money, yet many readers complain when we use these. That’s probably because most builders like the finished product to look clean and well-organized, especially when the other parts are expensive.
We’re fussy about power supply quality, yet really wanted an inexpensive unit that could output at least 850W to support our hardware. Efficiency credentials from 80-Plus also weighed heavily on our minds, and SilveStone’s ST85F-P wasthe only modular unit we could find to meet all of our quality, capacity, and efficiency criteria.
Read Customer Reviews of SilverStone's ST85F-P 850 W
This is a fully-modular unit, which means that even the main ATX power cable can be unhooked. While that feature eases power supply installation, it’s never needed in a finished system. That’s because all PCs need a power connector.
This is one of the few places we could have saved money without sacrificing quality by giving up features. Seasonic’s non-modular 850 W, 80 PLUS Silver power supply sells for $30 less, allowing us to put an exact price on SilverStone’s removable cables.
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHBS112 Blu-ray Burner
With $150 spent on the user-friendly features of a high-end case and modular power supply, we completed our build by adding high-end media capability. Blu-ray burners are now cheap at $100, and for $120 we even got one with 12x burn rate and software.
Read Customer Reviews of Lite-On's iHBS112
The iHBS112 also reads Blu-ray Disk format at 8x, reads and writes DVDs at up to 16x, and even rewrites BD-RE media at 2x.
