Headset: Corsair Vengeance 1500 Gaming
Headset
Price: $144
Corsair
Vengeance 1500
We’re big fans of Corsair’s gaming line,
which has produced some absolutely stellar pieces of hardware lately. Ideal for
gamers who don’t like the idea of shelling out for costly, foundation quaking
speaker systems, the Corsair Vengeance 1500 gaming headset contains single
cable Dolby 7.1 headphone technology that allows you to hear games the way they
were meant to be heard: loud and with bags of atmosphere.
It’s fully compatible with 3D audio
standards and contains a built-in boom-style microphone for voice chat, so
there’s everything you need to co-ordinate your inevitable online victories and
truly capture the aural nuances of any game you play.
PSU: Corsair TX 650W V2 PSU
Price: $135
Corsair
TX 650W V2 PSU
A new PSU might not be the most exciting
present you can buy for yourself, but don’t be too hasty: PSUs need to be
replaced when they get old, and an efficient PSU is better for you and your
system. Corsair’s Enthusiast Series TX V2 offers one of the best price to
performance ratios available, with 80-Plus bronze efficiency rating and a
modular cabling system that allows users to select their preferred combination
of eight SATA connectors, two PCI connectors and eight four-pin Molex
connectors -enough to supply any PC with the juice it needs in the format it
requires (and you can even disconnect ones you’re not using). The ultra-quiet
140mm fan only sweetens the deal.
AMD CPU: Bulldozer FX-8120 Black Edition
Price: $152
Bulldozer
FX-8120 Black
AMD might have taken a severe hit on its
processors again this year in the face of Intel’s blistering Sandy and Ivy
Bridge lines, but a whopping 50% discount on one of the company’s fastest CPUs
means that if you have an AMD system, there’s never been a better time to
upgrade. This 3.1GHz Bulldozer FX-8120 Black Edition chip is unlocked, meaning
overclockers can squeeze even better performance out of it, and the chip’s
eight-core design is unprecedented elsewhere in the consumer market. It’s still
hovering just above $160 from most outlets, but look out for those
participating in a $32 cash back scheme that’ll bring it home just under the
wire.
Intel CPU: Core i3-3220T
Price: $155
Core
i3-3220T
Intel’s entry-level line of Ivy Bridge Core
i3’s has only been on shelves for a few months, but their prices are already
dropping under $159. The Core i3-3220T is a dual-core desktop chip with
quad-core Hyper-Threading functionality. With Intel’s HD Graphics 2500 GPU and
a clock speed of 2.8GHz, this isn’t a gaming CPU, but it is a strong
all-rounder. If you have a Socket 1155 motherboard that’s begging for a chip
upgrade, you could do far worse for the same money. Of course, even though it’s
nowhere near the top of the line, it’s still as fast, out of the box, as the
Bulldozer FX-8210. If you’re not into overclocking, this is where to spend your
money.
Hard Drive: 3TB Seagate Barracuda
Price: $155
3TB
Seagate Barracuda
The New Year offers us all a clean slate,
so why not interpret that literally by buying yourself a fresh, empty hard
drive that you can fill with downloads? Seagate’s Barracuda drives have a long
and reliable history, and this 3TB monster even has the latest SA TA 6Gbps
connector, so you shouldn’t have any trouble filling it up as quickly as
possible. Remember, 2013 is going to be the year when the popularity of SSDs
really explodes, so there’s a good chance that mechanical hard drives will
never be as cheap again as they are now. A must for any PC owner who thinks
they’re a bit of a data-hoarder.
SSD: OCZ 120GB Vertex 3 SSD
Price: $154
OCZ
120GB Vertex 3 SSD
It’s probably not the best time to buy an
SSD, given the way prices have been dropping and will continue to drop
throughout 2013. Then again, if you just can’t wait to get your hands on some
of that ultra-fast solid-state storage, this is the best way to do it for under
$159. A not-unreasonable 120GB of storage gives you space for your operating
system and software, and your system benefits hugely from the 500MB/s
read/write speeds that you can only get with a SATA 6Gbps SSD drive. If you
want to give your PC the one upgrade that’ll improve it the most, this is the
one to go for.
Tablet PC: DGM T-703 Tablet PC
Price: $120
DGM
T-703 Tablet PC
The DGM-T703 is a 7” Android tablet that
you can pick up for under $128 on Amazon, and with the craze for mini-tablets
sweeping the world courtesy of the Nexus 7, this might be the cheapest way to
get your hands on one at almost a third of the price of Google’s effort. If the
price hasn’t clued you in, it’s far from the best tablet on the market - the
800×480 resolution is low, 4GB of storage is stupidly small (although it can be
expanded using micro-SD cards) and a 0.3 megapixel camera is laughably bad even
for video chatting, but it does run Android 4.0, and the 1.2GHz ARM Cortex A8
CPU is as the same as the one that underpins the Apple A4 (found in the
original iPad). Wi-Fi support and HDMI-out turn it into a convincing
entertainment and web-browsing machine. If you’ve never owned a tablet or just
want an Android machine, the GDM T-703 fits the bill.
Nvidia Graphics: Gainward GeForce GTX
650 1GB
Price: $149
Gainward
GeForce GTX 650 1GB
Despite costing less than $160, the GeForce
GTX 650 is a fair upgrade that’ll turn your workstation PC into a gaming capable
machine in a single stroke. Based on the same revised version of the Kepler
architecture seen in the ‘Gamer’s choice’ graphics card, the GeForce GTX 660,
the GTX 650 is right up to date despite its slightly cut down specs. Although
it benchmarks worse than the Radeon HD 7770, a seasoned overclocker can take
advantage of Nvidia’s more robust hardware to unleash the inner-power of this
card.
If you know how to get the most out of
graphics cards, there’s a real bargain to be had here, but if you’re a bit more
tentative, there’s a Radeon across the street with your name on it.
AMD Graphics: Sapphire Radeon HD 7770
1GB
Price: $149
Sapphire
Radeon HD 7770 1GB
It’s a low-end card if you’re a serious
gamer, but within our sub-$159 budget, it’s the best graphics card your money
can get you. The spiritual successor to the popular HD 5770, it uses AMD’s
‘Cape Verde’ architecture – a cut-down version of AMD’s more impressive Tahiti
platform found in the high-end HD 7900 cards. Still, that means it’s running an
iteration of the latest hardware, and its DirectX 11 capability and dual
mini-DisplayPort-out gives you plenty of room for tweaking in both software and
hardware.
Performance is good for the money, even if
it’s not going to give you ultra-high definition gaming. However, if you’re
upgrading from an on-board GPU, prepare to be blown away by the improvement.
