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Best
Sound Card
Terratec
Xlerate Pro
Review: Terratec
Xlerate Pro
Price: $69
This
was a dangerous decision. The Terratec Xlerate Pro supports
A3D 2.0 audio acceleration, and all of its features including,
advanced wave tracing with up to 64 reflections, in addition
to digital audio out help make this one fine card. The Sound
Blaster Live! Platinum you might think is better suited for
the "best sound card of the year" award, but you would be wrong.
While the Sound Blaster Live! Has a huge suite of features,
most of which you (being a gamer) are unlikely to use, yet still
pay for. The Sound Blaster Live Platinum is simply not worth
the $199 price tag. Unless of course, you are a musician.
Best
Motherboard
Abit
BP6
Review: N/A
Price: $120
Never
have I seen as much innovation and originality in a motherboard.
Breaking all the rules, Abit's BP6 allows you to run 2 simultaneous
Celerons in SMP mode without any special modifications. With
support for up to 5 PCI devices, along with built in ATA/66
support Abit's BP6 is truly a masterpiece.
Best
Hard Drive
Maxtor
DiamondMax Plus 40
Review: N/A
Price: $349
This
was one the toughest decisions I had to make. Should I go with
a super speedy SCSI drive, or a newer drive based on ATA/66?
Lately with the ATA/66 - 7200 RPM drives closing the performance
gap between SCSI and ATA based drives, the choice for the DiamondMax
Plus 40 was clear. Containing a massive 40GIGs worth a storage,
you should have trouble filling this colossal drive up. Despite
being enormous, this drive is no speed slouch. Utilizing ATA/66
and having a 7200 RPM spindle rate, this drive is on the top
of the IDE HD benchmarks.
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