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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes
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Holiday Gift Guide 2010: High-end Hardware

By | October 25, 2010, 6:12pm PDT

Summary: The geekiest geeks want hardware components for the holidays. Here’s our list of the best picks in the high-end segment.

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 six cool tech high-end hardware gift ideas.

Check it out!

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

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Hard Drive, Video Card, Motherboard, Holiday Gift Guide, Intel Core Microarchitecture, Graphics, Western Digital RE4 WD2003FYYS, OCZ Colossus LT Series OCZSSD2-1CLSLT500G, Video Cards, Processors, Hardware, Components, Semiconductors, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology.

Disclosure

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

All opinions expressed on Hardware 2.0 are those of Adrian Kingsley-Hughes. Every effort is made to ensure that the information posted is accurate. If you have any comments, queries or corrections, please contact Adrian via the email link here. Any possible conflicts of interest will be posted below. [Updated: February 23, 2010] - Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has no business relationships, affiliations, investments, or other actual/potential conflicts of interest relating to the content posted so far on this blog.

Biography

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is an internationally published technology author who has devoted over a decade to helping users get the most from technology -- whether that be by learning to program, building a PC from a pile of parts, or helping them get the most from their new MP3 player or digital camera.

Adrian has authored/co-authored technical books on a variety of topics, ranging from programming to building and maintaining PCs. His most recent books include "Build the Ultimate Custom PC", "Beginning Programming" and "The PC Doctor's Fix It Yourself Guide". He has also written training manuals that have been used by a number of Fortune 500 companies.

Adrian also runs a popular blog under the name The PC Doctor, where he covers a range of computer-related topics -- from security to repairing and upgrading.

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RE: Holiday Gift Guide 2010: High-end Hardware
Todd Lillitch Updated - 6th Oct
Hmm...definitely some to consider. I'm hoping that if I do gift these to my siblings, that they won't flake out on the install. I'd hate to give out "high-end holiday decorations!"
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Motherboard
archangel9999 Updated - 26th Oct 2010
The EVGA motherboard is good but it's mainstream not high-end - if you're really going down the 3 or 4 SLI path (either with multiple video cards or video cards and Tesla GP-GPUs) to complement your honker extreme i7 - then this motherboards x16/x16/x8 interface unnecessarily slows down your third card. You'd need something like one of Gigabyte's mobos that offer four (all) x16 slots to really trick out your hotrod.
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SSD
archangel9999 Updated - 26th Oct 2010
If you're going to use an SSD as your primary drive - be sure to load up the machine with as much RAM as possible to keep paging to a minimum - excessive writes/rewrites (like from paging) will shorten the SSDs lifetime - also SSDs have great single threaded throughput but don't expect the same kind of performance once you start hitting them with multiple streams of non-contiguous read/writes - they can hit a wall

Personally for my work mix my preference would be SATA III 600GB Velociraptors raided for the OS, paging, and any heavy read/write space needs - then put the apps and docs and mostly read files on the SSD for fast launching. The raided VRs benchmark as fast as an SSD and in heavy multiple random load can perform better.
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RE: Holiday Gift Guide 2010: High-end Hardware
drupaler305 8th Sep
I just installed an Intel SSD 510 series drive and the difference is night and day compared to SATA technology. This holiday I'll be giving one away on the Santa Claus Christmas Forums.
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RE: Holiday Gift Guide 2010: High-end Hardware
Todd Lillitch Updated - 6th Oct
Hmm...definitely some to consider. I'm hoping that if I do gift these to my siblings, that they won't flake out on the install. I'd hate to give out "high-end holiday decorations!"

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