Mik's Picks: Weekend Hardware Sales - Cases, Laptops, Monitors

Another weekend has come-and-gone, seeing the addition of many hardware sales/deals out there for us to take advantage of. This week we dug up a great variety of sales, including a large hard drive, laptop, monitor, and a couple of sweet gaming cases.

Let's jump straight into this weekend's best sales we found:

27" Acer LED-backlit Monitor ($220): First up, we found a 27'' LED-backlit monitor from ACER that is listed for $220 at the time of writing, down From $260. The Acer unit is $40 off from the normal price and should be a great way to max out your resolution at 1920x1080 (16:9, of course) and have a ton of physical real-estate to look at. A 6ms latency (GTG) gives you the enough speed out of a gaming monitor -- not that many people will notice the difference between a few milliseconds, anyway. It offers a lot for the price, but if HDMI is important to you, that is one thing this unit does not have; DVI and VGA work as well as ever, you just won't be able to use an HDMI connector.

2TB Seagate Barracuda HDD ($100): We found a 2TB, 7200RPM hard drive from Seagate for a flat $100; this Barracuda has a massive 2TB storage capacity, plenty of room for all your legally-obtained movies and songs you may or may not have. The drive's mid-range RPM means it'll host applications with reasonable speed, and the high cache -- while drives rarely fully utilize more than 16-32MB of cache -- means the drive should perform well when bursting operations.

Rosewill Thor V2 ($100): Rosewill has their full-tower Thor V2 case on sale for $100 until 2/13 with the promo code "EMCXVXN43." We loved the Thor V2 when we reviewed it, and at $30 off, it's honestly a pretty sweet deal  that we're comfortable recommending. With this full-sized case, you get 1x230mm front fan (yes, really), 1x230mm top fan, 1x230mm side fan, and a 1x140mm rear exhaust fan, providing a ton of air movement at a very low overall noise level. It also features nice cable management options, a tool-less design, and - of course - support for liquid cooling. We found the fan controllers and dust filters to be the most immediately useful, too.

NZXT Phantom 001 ($100): Not to be outdone, NZXT has an equally-killer promotion on their original Phantom case on Newegg. Also for $100, this full-tower case was designed to have that "gamer aesthetic" we see so often; the jagged, edgy design offers a visual alternative to the above Thor V2, but offers many of the same features. The Phantom has similarly great fan placement and cable management, making it a good option in the $100 range of gaming cases.

Samsung NP355E7C Notebook ($480): This pick of the week is something a little bit different: we found this mid-range Samsung laptop hovering at $480 on TigerDirect - it ships with a (rather large) 17.3'' display that's powered by the A6 APU's integrated 7520G chip. The 7520G and dual-core A6 (single FPU; dual INT) will run more casual games—like Minecraft, Counter-Strike: GO, and Diablo 3—fairly well, but it won't play games like Battlefield 3 at any respectable level. We see this laptop as mostly useful for the standard work/web/slacking unit, but its ability to run a couple of the more graphically-optimized (read: less detailed) games is very welcome. For gamers looking for a more serious gaming laptop, this is a good upper-crust option.

Well, that's all for this week. Until next time.

- Michael "Mikagmann2" Mann