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PICKING OUR POWER SUPPLY
Corsair CX 430w 80 PLUS bronze Certified – $49.99
The power supply is often overlooked as an item that demands priority when it comes to budgeting. Through my own experiences and anecdotal evidence all over the Internet, this is serious stuff.
An unreliable power source can effect your system in a bewildering number of ways. Random freezing and resetting, stability issues, all the way through to frying your components on the way out.
Indeed, I have had the priviledge to witness and enjoy the fragrance of toasting silicon once too often. Problem with a sub par power supply is that in the worst case, when it dies, it tends to have a very nasty habit of taking out other more expensive parts with it. CPU, motherboard, graphics card, hard drive, you name it. If it needs power, it connects to the power supply, it’s fair game.
Now, having emphasized that the power supply is definitely not a place to cut corners, it doesn’t mean we can’t be smart about it.
Corsair are firmly entrenched as a solid choice for system builders. They are one of the very few companies who branched into selling power supplies and managed to successfully build their reputation and market share. They did this by sourcing quality designs from original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and providing excellent support to backup their products.
The CX430 we are interested in is the 80 plus bronze certified version rated for 430 watts, also known as the CX430 V3 or revised V2.
The biggest item on our list in terms of power consumption is the 7850. Other than this, the rest of the system is actually rather miserly with the electricity. 430 watts will give us plenty of headroom.
ALTERNATIVES
Cooler Master GX – 450W 80 PLUS Bronze PSU – $49.99
This Cooler Master unit is also a decent candidate to power our gamer build.
If the special is still on, feel free to get this one instead of the CX430. They are both rated around the same wattage, both 80 plus bronze certified.
OPTIONAL OPTICALS
I have chosen not to include an optical drive in this build. USB booting is standard now and with services like Steam, Netflix and Hulu available, I literally go for years at a time before I need to touch physical media. Even then, it’s usually to fix something on an older computer.
Having said that, people do have different habits. So I will leave this one up to you, reader. Whether you are a DVD fanboy (or girl) or a Bluray connoisseur, adjust to taste.
ALTERNATIVES
Samsung 24x SATA DVD±RW – $20.61
If you do need a drive in your system, this simple drive will do the job nicely. Connects via SATA and writes DVDs.
Pioneer Blu Ray Combo Drive – $47.95
Go up in price a little bit from the Samsung and you can get yourself this Pioneer bluray combo drive that will do all the same things, and read Bluray. Also connects on SATA, and yes, it does write DVDs too.