System Storage And Memory
System Drives: 2 x A-Data S599 64 GB SSD in RAID 0
A-Data continues to provide some of the best value in SandForce-based SSDs, offering up to 280 MB/s reads and 270 MB/s writes from a single drive. We picked two drives to deliver even higher throughput.
Read Customer Reviews of A-Data's S599 64 GB SSD
A-Data even includes 3.5” bay adapters. Even though these aren’t designed to work with 3.5” hot-swap bays, they’re perfect for our chosen case which supports only screw-in installation.
System RAM: 8 GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 CAS 8
While high-density RAM usually has a hard time keeping up with the performance levels of low-density competitors, G.Skill was able to deliver a value-priced 2 x 4 GB configuration at a blistering DDR3-1600 CAS 8-8-8-24 rating.
Read Customer Reviews of G.Skill's 8 GB Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 Kit
We saved $20 by choosing these 1.50 V parts over the 1.60 V CAS 7-8-7-24 version, harboring a hunch that the higher-rated modules used the same parts. If that hunch is correct, increasing these to 1.60 V should allow room to use enhanced timings, higher data rates, or a combination of data rate and timing improvements.