Weekend Hardware Sales - $30 MITX Case, $340 GTX 970, $320 290X

We hope you had your fill of Thanksgiving turkey and survived the ensuing Cyber Monday sales rush. With several of the sales at major retailers ended, we had to dig a bit harder to find remaining good bargains. These left-overs would be great as gifts for the upcoming holidays, or even just to treat yourself after having to sit through hours of family torture and bad football. This weekend, we found sales on RAM, an SSD, a couple video cards, and an mITX case.

Team Elite Plus 8GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM ($62): The past few weeks, the price of memory has fallen back to what we're used to from a few years ago, making it a great time to purchase more RAM. Team has quickly become a go-to budget option with their low-priced memory, generally receiving positive user reviews. Newegg is selling 8GB of Team's 1600MHz RAM that would be great in just about any system.

Cooler Master HAF Stacker 915R ($30): Cooler Master has a great sale going on with the HAF Stacker 915R, a uniquely designed small form factor case. These cases are designed to be used in conjunction with each other, allowing you to stack 2 or more on top of each other, something we've previously shown. These small cases have three internal 3.5" bays, clearance for up to 360mm long video cards, and room for ATX power supplies. Since it is a HAF case, it has plenty of room for proper airflow, even though it is mini-ITX form factor.

OCZ ARC 100 240GB SSD ($100): If you still haven't made the leap from a traditional HDD to an SSD, it's time to consider mitigating the biggest bottleneck in your system. With an SSD, systems experienced decreased loading times and faster read/write transactions, leaving us curious as to how we did without them for so long. OCZ – recently acquired by Toshiba – is offering this 240GB SSD for $100 right now.

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 mITX ($340): NVIDIA knocked it out of the park with their newest Maxwell video cards (reviewed here). This Gigabyte GTX 970 has 1664 CUDA Cores and comes with 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit interface. The video card can effortlessly play most games out at highest settings with 1080p displays. The thing that makes this GPU special is its small size, measuring in at 170mm long, it's perfect for those small form-factor builds.

MSI R9 290X Lightning ($320): MSI is selling this beast of a video card at a marked-down price. The R9 290X is the premiere video card from AMD, coming with 2816 Stream Processors and sporting 4GB of GDDR5 on a massive 512-bit interface. What makes this video card special, besides the tri-fan cooling system, is the twin BIOS that makes going from standard to overclocked settings as easy as flipping a switch (and also offers protection from failed flashes). This monster is almost 12" long, so make sure it will fit in your case. Consider an NZXT H440 for a guaranteed fit.

That's all for this week. There are many more deals out there to find, so until next time.

- Michael "Mikagmann2" Mann.