Holiday Gift Guide 2009: Hardware components

As the holiday season approaches, people start thinking about gift ideas. To help you give (or receive) the perfect holiday gift this year I've put together a list of five cool tech gift ideas for hardware components.

Check it out!

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Processor: Core i7-975 Extreme Edition 3.333GHz

The Core i7 processors represents a new era in architecture for Intel. Gone is the LGA 775 socket, instead replaced by the larger Socket LGA 1366.

With the Core i7 Intel has also reintroduced Hyper-Threading, giving the desktop CPUs the power of eight virtual cores. You also get the brand new X58 chipset and support for DDR3.

Additional info - What you need to go Core i7!!!

Price: around $1,000 | Find out more: [Reviews] [Spec]

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Motherboard: Asus P6T Deluxe/OC Palm

The Asus P6T Deluxe is, without a doubt, the best motherboard to match up with the Core i7.

There are cheaper boards, and there are now boards that cost more, but the P6T Deluxe/OC Palm is the best. It’s a fast, stable board that’s packed with features and settings for the enthusiast and overclocker.

Excellent board!

Price: $290 | Find out more: [Reviews] [Spec]

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Graphics card: PowerColor AX4850 512MD3-PPH Radeon HD 4850 512MB

You can pick up some truly excellent graphics cards for under $100. In fact, if you buy the right bit of kit, you can pretty much get all the graphics card you’ll need for under $100.

What’s great about the HD 4850 is that it is, as far as most gamers are concerned, the highest-end graphics card they need. Why? Because if you are playing your favorite games (Crysis, Far Cry 2, Left 4 Dead, Call of Duty 5 …) at screen resolutions of no more than 1600×1200 (or the equivalent in wide-screen) you can get all the gaming power you need for under $99!

Price: $99 | Find out more: PowerColor

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Solid State Drive: Intel X-25E

There’s no doubt that solid-state SATA hard drives (SSDs) are the future. You get fast transfer speeds, improved battery life on notebooks, and quicker boot times. The only downsides - cost per gigabyte.

Also worth remembering is that these drives are 2.5? form-factor, so you need to take that into account if fitting them into desktop systems.

The Intel X-25E offers read speeds of up to 250MB/s and write speeds up to 170MB/s, making this one super-fast drive.

Price: 32GB: $360 / 64GB: $780 | Find out more: [Spec 32GB/64GB]

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Music studio: V-Studio 100

A portable music studio, the V-Studio 100 enables musicians to create, record, produce, and perform music with or without a computer. The V-Studio 100 is an all-in-one production suite that integrates a USB 2.0 audio interface, DAW controller, Digital Mixer, SD Recorder and VS Production Pack. The V-Studio 100 is ideal for the musician, singer-songwriter, MC, producer, or engineer on-the-go regardless of whether they use a Mac or PC.

You don’t have to be a professional musician to enjoy the V-Studio 100. For the podcaster or music archivist, it’s a high-quality digital recorder! You can also use the V-Studio 100 as an audio interface to convert your old cassettes and vinyl albums to digital format.

Price: $699 | Find out more: Cakewalk

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