Hardware 2.0: Best graphics cards, hard drives, and solid state drives list (2012 edition)

Summary: Here is the second installment of the final "Hardware 2.0" Best Kit Lists for 2012, looking at GPUs, hard drives, and solid state drives in the extreme, mainstream, and budget price categories.

By Adrian Kingsley-Hughes for Hardware 2.0 | December 13, 2012 -- 18:04 GMT (10:04 PST)

Follow @the_pc_doc

Previous | Next Image 6 of 11

Extreme HDD: Western Digital VelociRaptor WD1000DHTZ 1TB

Built around a 10,000-RPM spin speed platters, these SATA 6 Gb/s drives include a 64 MB cache, the Western Digital VelociRaptor drives are the best that money can buy.

While the performance doesn't come close to that of a solid state drive, the VelociRaptor is a blazing fast hard drive, and is packed with features such as pre-emptive wear leveling and no-touch ramp load head technology that help deliver the highest possible reliability rating of any SATA drive.

Price: $299.

Image source: Western Digital.

Topic: Hardware

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily email newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

Talkback

2 comments

Log in or register to join the discussion

Just Need More DVI Connectors

I do not care about gaming speeds. I care only about the number of monitors I can connect to it and still have reasonable response. Ideally 4. What about these types of cards?

MichaelInMA
13 December, 2012 19:53

Reply Vote
- From the images above
  
  it looks like 3 on the nVidia card, 2 (plus an HDMI) on the top-line AMD, 1 (plus an HDMI) on the mainstream card, & 1 (plus an HDMI & a VGA output) on the budget card.
  
  spdragoo@...
  14 December, 2012 13:03
  
  Reply Vote