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The drive in this build is a pretty standard 250 GB SATA drive. Hard drive performance will suffer compared to the high-end builds, but it shouldn't impact the total performance all that much. We should note that we used this drive because it was on-hand and it fits the purpose of a budget drive. If we were to purchase a new part today, we would have likely opted for the Western Digital Caviar 320 GB drive, which can be purchased for $80 online but has an extra 70 GB of space.
Case: Raidmax Smilodon
The Smilodon is a relatively low-cost case with subjective styling but - more importantly - lots of case fans, and it's not terribly loud. Airflow at a decent noise level is a very important feature for any overclocker, and the Smilodon does it on a budget.
Power: Aerocool Zerodba 620w
Stable Power is a staple of a good overclocking system - never underestimate the importance of a solid PSU in any system if stability is important to you. With only a single graphics card to worry about, the 620W Zerdoba should have no trouble powering to the P5B, CPU and 8800 GTX.
This is the standard drive we've used in all of our marathon builds thus far. Nothing much to say about it except it's nice to have a SATA DVD-ROM, so we don't have to use those terrible IDE cables.
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Don Woligroski was a former senior hardware editor for Tom's Hardware. He has covered a wide range of PC hardware topics, including CPUs, GPUs, system building, and emerging technologies.
