Hard Drive And Case
Hard Drive : Western Digital Caviar Black 640 GB 32 MB Cache
One of the trade-offs we made to lower the price of the system to $1,250 from the last marathon build’s price of $1,500 was to surrender a hard drive. Sure, we’re not running a RAID array in this PC, but to be brutally honest, the typical user isn’t typically going to see a big real-world performance jump with a RAID array anyway.
Read Customer Reviews of Western Digital’s Caviar Black 640GB
Instead, we’re going for a single Western Digital Caviar drive, the 640 GB with 32 MB of cache. For $85 it offers a lot of space and good transfer speeds for a single drive.
Case : Antec Three Hundred
Read Customer Reviews of Antec’s Three Hundred Chassis
The chassis was another trade-off we made for financial reasons, so we gave up Cooler Master’s great Cosmos 1000 in favor of the frugal, but trusty, Antec Three Hundred.
For $55, we’re not buying at the top of anyone’s line, but we are getting a simple, good-looking case that’s built well and does the job. Our only real beef with the Three Hundred is its lack of a front intake fan, but the two 120 mm fans on the rear and top of the case do a good enough job of keeping the interior cool, especially when we’re using a dual-slot video card like the Radeon 4870 X2.