Holiday Gift Guide 2010: Mainstream Hardware

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 mainstream hardware tech gift ideas.

Check it out!

Note: All prices are approximate. Shop around for the best deals.

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Processor: AMD Athlon II X4 630

Dual-core processors have given way to quad-core for mainstream users.

The AMD Athlon X4 630 is a 2.8GHz part that offers plenty of performance. Not only have you got a processor that can handle gaming, but also the heavy demands that multimedia encoding and decoding puts on a system.

Excellent processor for under $100.

Price: $90

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Motherboard: ASUS M4A77D

A mainstream processor needs something a little better than a budget motherboard. A better motherboard offers more features, and more "tweakability."

The ASUS M4A77D is a rock-solid motherboard that offers great performance out of the box, but there's plenty in the BIOS to keep the experimenter happy.

Awesome board for under $100.

Price: $80 | Find out more: [Reviews]

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Graphics card: EVGA 768-P3-1360-TR GeForce GTX 460

It’s tricky to pick the right GPU from the ballooning mainstream market, but the best buy currently is the EVGA 768-P3-1360-TR GeForce GTX 460, which is powered by the Fermi GPU. It has 768MB of GDDR5, a core running at 675MHz and a shader clock running at 1350MHz.

You also get CUDA and PhysX support, DirectX 11 support, and offers a mini HDMI and two DVI ports.

All this for $170.

Price: $170 | Find out more: [Reviews]

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Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10000CSRTL 1TB

The Western Digital Caviar Green WD10000CSRTL has it all - bags of capacity, good reliability, and to top it all off, reduced power consumption.

Not the cheapest 1TB drive out there, but certainly one of the best.

Price: $80 | Find out more: [Reviews]

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Display: ASUS VH242H Black 23.6"

Quite simply this is one of the best mainstream displays out there.

If you're in the market for a display, check out the ASUS VH242H.

Not only do you get a cracking good 23.6" display, with vivid colors, fast response time, and a good brightness and contrast range, but the display also comes with a great stand that offers both swivel, tilt and height adjustment.

Price: $190

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