Memory, Hard Drives, And Optical Drive
With 9-9-9-24 timings at 1600 MT/s, Corsair's Vengeance kit isn't the most aggressive one we've featured in the System Builder Marathon, but we're banking on capable overclocking. This dual-channel, 8 GB set of modules sells for $70 on Newegg.
Read Customer Reviews of Corsair's Vengeance 8 GB Kit
System Drive: Samsung 840 Series 120 GB SATA 6Gb/s SSD
Instead of using a 64 GB SSD, which is barely enough for an operating system and a few applications, we're outfitting this quarter's PC with a more realistic 128 GB repository. Samsung's 840 is a proven performer, and the 120 GB version is reasonably priced at $100 on Newegg.
Read Customer Reviews of Samsung's 840 Series 120 GB SSD
Hard Drive: Western Digital Blue 1 TB 7200 RPM Hard Drive
With a larger, more expensive SSD storing more of our performance-sensitive software, we'll save a few bucks on user data by swapping out our Caviar Black drive for a slower Caviar Blue model. Specification-wise, we aren't giving anything up with this 1 TB, 7200 RPM model armed with 64 MB of cache. But its $70 price tag is notably lower.
Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital's Blue 1 TB Hard Drive
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/RSBS DVD Burner
With our budget already pushing the $1300 limit, we picked the lowest-priced DVD burner we could find. Surprisingly, the cheapest option was a retail (and not an OEM) package. Samsung's SH-224DB/RSBS fills in nicely.
