Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

The Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 is the latest series from Seagate's famous Barracuda line of consumer-grade hard drives. It offers capacities up to 750GB in a single drive. That's a feat not matched by any other hard drive manufacturer in the world until today.

The drive we selected for the Christmas gaming PC is the 250GB model. Like the 750GB flagship, this drive comes with a large 16MB SDRAM buffer and support for Serial ATA 3Gb/s transfers. It also boasts the same high sustained throughput of 78MB/s.

At just $ 0.32 (RM 1.17) per GB, the 250GB Barracuda 7200.10 is cheap for the amount of space it offers. After all, it is the latest model from Seagate, and is backed by a 5-year warranty. It's just the thing we need for our Christmas gaming PC.

Sony 16X DVD-ROM

This DVD-ROM is just like any other 16X DVD-ROM drive in the market. It comes with a 512MB buffer and is capable of read speeds of up to 48X for CDs and 16X for DVDs. It has an access time of 100 ms for CDs and 85 ms for DVDs.

What's great about this drive is its value for money. It offers 16X DVD and 48X CD read speeds for a very low price. But feel free to substitute this DVD-ROM for any other DVD-ROM that may be on sale wherever you are.

We chose an ordinary DVD-ROM over a DVD writer that you might expect, because of the proliferation and advances in USB flash drives. With USB flash drives providing better performance and ease of use, many users end up writing more often to these drive than DVDs. So, we decided to skip the DVD writer for a DVD-ROM drive.

Antec TruePower 2.0 TP-II 430

The power supply unit (PSU) is a key part of any gaming system. It is essentially the heart of the PC, pumping power to every component. Therefore, it pays to buy the best you can afford.

We chose the Antec TruePower 2.0 TP-II 430 PSU because it fits the requirements of our Christmas gaming PC. In fact, it's powerful enough that should you choose to tack on a second GeForce 7600 GT card to run in SLI mode, it is more than up to the task.

Please note that you should NEVER buy a PSU merely on its total power output. Many companies create false impressions with claims that a particular PSU can supply incredible amounts of power, when it can only produce far less power in useful loads. For more information on choosing the right PSU, click here.

The Antec TruePower 2.0 TP-II 430 PSU has two 12V lines that are capable of loads of up to 17A. It also comes with two PCI Express graphics card power connectors. So, you can easily hook up two NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT graphics cards and use them in SLI mode.