Looking as out of place in this category as a Ferrari at a Citroen Saxo convention, the Western Digital Raptor X's 150GB capacity is rather lowly in these terabyte days. Its low areal density also means that it's no longer the fastest drive in terms of raw sustained throughput. The latest drives can read data around 15-20MB/sec faster than this drive. However, the Raptor X is the only 10,000rpm S-ATA hard disk, which pays dividends for random access. It posted the fastest score in our Gimp image editing test, and was one of the top contenders in the Crysis level load, only beaten by Samsung's SpinPoint F1 drives. At 91p per gigabyte, the Raptor X won't win any awards for value, but it's still one of the fastest hard disks available.

• PSUs - 14th July 2008
• Multi-GPU graphics - 20th June 2008
• CPU water cooling - 17th June 2008
• Hard disks - 20th March 2008
• Audio hardware - 29th February 2008
• Graphics cards - 24th January 2008
• CPUs - 21st December 2007

• Cooler Master Cosmos S - Cases
• Lian Li PC-P60 Armorsuit - Cases
• Asus Rampage Formula - Motherboards
• Gigabyte GV-NX96T512H-B - Graphics cards
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 - Processors
• Akasa Vortexx Neo - Other cooling hardware
• Zerotherm Hurricane HC92-Cu 8800 - Other cooling hardware