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.
Power: SilverStone Strider Plus 850 W
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.
