Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
SoundAdapter
Integrated
Integrated audio on most modern motherboards is excellent, so much so that
standalone sound adapters are almost never needed nowadays. Even most
serious audiophiles and gamers find integrated audio acceptable, and the in-
tegrated Intel HD audio on the DX58SO motherboard is certainly more than
good enough to suit nearly anyone's needs.
If you plan to use a 5.1, 6.1, or 7.1 speaker system for gaming and you need EAX
audio support for positional audio with your games, install a Creative Sound
Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer (PCI interface) or Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium (PCI
Express interface). But before you buy any sound adapter, test the integrated
audio to see if it suits your needs.
Boot/SystemDrive
Crucial CT128M225 128 GB SSD
(
http://www.crucial.com
)
We wish we could use a solid-state boot/system drive in every system we
build. In fact, we wish we could use SSDs exclusively. That day isn't here yet,
but it's rapidly drawing nearer as SSD capacities continue to increase and pric-
es continue to decline. For the time being, unless you have an unlimited bud-
get, you'll have to use rotating drives for bulk data storage. But on an extreme
system, we can afford to devote some of the budget to buying an SSD large
enough to store our system, temporary, and working files.
We decided to allocate $300 to $400 of our budget to the SSD. That left us
with a major decision to make: should we choose a
single-level cell
(SLC) SSD
of smaller capacity or a
multi-level cell
(MLC) SSD of larger capacity? SLC drives
are usually faster and degrade more slowly than MLC drives, but they also cost
about four times as much for a given capacity.
When we built this system, $300 to $400 was enough to buy a 32 GB SLC SSD
or a 128 GB MLC SSD. Although we'd obviously have preferred to use an SLC
drive for its performance and durability, 32 GB was simply too small for what
we wanted to do with the drive. The next step up, a 64 GB SLC drive, would
have cost $600 to $800, which was simply too large a chunk of the budget to
devote to the SSD. And even with 64 GB, we'd have been cramped for space.
So, we reluctantly decided to limit our candidates to MLC models and look for
a drive in the 128 GB range. We found about two dozen drives that met our
budget and capacity requirements, from manufacturers like Corsair, Crucial,
Kingston, OCZ, and Western Digital. (The Intel X25-M would also have been a
serious candidate, but unfortunately the 80 GB model was too small for our
needs and the 160 GB model was too expensive.)
Based on our universally good experiences with Crucial products over many
years, we chose the Crucial CT128M225 SSD. With sustained 250 MB/s reads
and 190 MB/s writes, the M225 is one of the fastest drives in its class. It's large
enough and fast enough to do what we need it to do, and it does so at a rea-
sonable price.
