Welcome to another addition of our Weekly Hardware Sales round-up, affectionately called "Mik's Piks." Now that we're past the Black Friday sales madness, and the Cyber Monday madness, and the Cyber Week madness... we are now onto the "Techdays of Christmas!" This time around I have found some very good deals on a couple cases, a couple video cards (yes, really), some RAM, and a
Sentey Optimus Extreme Division Mid-Tower Case ($35): The first deal I found is on a great budget case from Sentey. The Optimus offers plenty for a low price for those not only wanting good looks, but extras you rarely find at this price range. You get three LED fans -- two 120mm and one 180mm side LED fan. You also get one 120mm rear fan, so you get four fans stock (3 LED, 1 plain)! This is accompanied with a fan controller on the front of the case, along with USB 2.0 and 3.0 connections and audio jacks. Four 5.25" tool-free bays and four 3.5" removable bays are present in the drive scaffolding. The spacious interior allows for up to 270mm video cards in length. Other extras are a dust filter under the PSU and a somewhat hidden cable management system.
CFI Diablo LT Mid-Tower Gaming Case ($40): The next case I found is a beauty as well. I really like the look of this case, and even though CFI isn't one of the brands heavily saturating the market, this one gets great reviews. First off, it comes with four 120mm fans stock, so you'll be fine without adding additional fans right now. The Diablo also offers good cable management to hide those pesky cables, making the interior look better and improving air flow to lower the thermals (it also looks good with the clear side panel). You get four 5.25" external drive bays, four internal 3.5" bays, two internal 2.5" bays (for your SSDs), two hot swap drive bays, and seven expansion slots. The front of the case offers two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, and audio ports.
Team Vulcan 8GB 2400MHz RAM ($60): Team is a newer company that has garnered attention on retailers for its low-price RAM offerings. This memory kit is about $20 cheaper than most others of the same specifications and performs stably from preliminary research. Since it is DDR3 2400MHz, it's great if you are looking to either build or upgrade an HTPC with integrated graphics that requires higher speed memory. Even if you are not, this RAM would be solid in any system that can support the DDR3 2400MHz speed (or overclocking).
MSI GTX 650 Ti 1GB GPU ($110): Once again, this video card is on sale! As noted in our Cheap Bastard's gaming PC build guide, video card prices and supply are unpredictable right now, so the usual 650 Ti Boost and AMD 7850 aren't available at their typically-low prices.
This NVIDIA GPU boasts a 928MHz core clock and 768 CUDA Cores. It also comes with 1GB of GDDR5 memory on a 128-bit interface; we strongly recommend 2GB of video RAM or higher on mid-range gaming PCs, but if you're not concerned with playing big title games on maxed settings, this will get you by just fine. You also get one HDMI port, one VGA port, and one DVI port. You do not, however, get the option of SLI, but the small size of the GPU should allow it to fit into most cases out there. The GTX 650 Ti should play most games out at medium settings, but will struggle with games like the Battlefield franchise and Crysis games (expect medium/low mix at 1080). For the low price, this is a great option for gamers who play games like League of Legends, WoW, and SWTOR. You also get a $75 Value Coupon for WarFrame, Marvel Heroes, and Neverwinter.
XFX Double D HD7870 2GB GPU ($170): Since we are a site that is dedicated to PC gaming, we had to include this great deal on a very capable video card. This XFX card offers great cooling with dual heatsink fans to keep thermals down. You get 1280 Stream processors, a 1200MHz (4.8Gbps) Memory Clock that is boosted with the AMD APP Acceleration hardware and software technology which gives you enhanced speed and performance; as for memory, it's running 2GB of GDDR5 RAM on a 256-bit interface. This offers you great gameplay at 1080p, even though this video card is technically a generation behind what AMD currently offers. You'll be able to play most games out at high or highest settings, more graphics-intensive games like Battlefield 4 and Crysis 3 at mid-to-high settings. For the low price, you get a great budget video card.
Deal of the Week
ADATA XPG SX900 256GB SSD ($160): The deal of the week comes from ADATA. A 256GB SSD for only $160 puts us at well under $1/GB; this might be normal if it was on a questionable controller or TLC NAND, but this one is on SandForce's 2nd-Gen controller and uses MLC NAND for improved endurance. For more on what makes a good SSD controller, read this article and our SSD dictionary to understand what an SSD does. You get a large amount of storage space for an SSD at 256GB, a proven controller with the SandForce SF-2281 unit, and the new firmware update should increase the lifespan. You also get a 2.5" to 3.5" bracket to help mount this into a case that does not offer a native 2.5" bay. For only $160, it's a good entry SSD.
Well, that's all for this week. There are many more deals out there to find, so until next time.
- Michael "Mikagmann2" Mann.