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Weekend Hardware Sales - $20 CX430W PSU, $95 240GB SSD, $350 R9 290X

Posted on October 12, 2014

Welcome to another edition of our weekend-ly hardware sales roundup. This weekend, we decided to do things a little differently; we've paired up dual components that we found to be great deals. I found a couple power supplies, a couple SSDs, and a couple of video cards at discounted prices.

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Corsair CX430 430w PSU ($20): This power supply is ideal for those who are looking to build a low-budget HTPC or gaming rig. At only 430W, this power supply is not going to work with a CrossfireX or SLI setup (not a good one, anyway), but if you don't require a great deal of power, it'll be great. Keep in mind that it is not modular, so if cable management is a big deal for you, this may not be the best fit. At 80 Plus Bronze, it should help a little with the power bill; ultimately, Corsair's CX430 is best used in ultra-budget PCs that don't need to have all kinds of frills.

EVGA SuperNOVA 750w PSU ($80): For those of you looking for a solid power supply that is 80 Plus Gold and fully-modular – a few steps up from the 430W option above – this could be the power supply for you. Being 750W, this should be great in just about any mid-range or high-end gaming rig. At 80 Plus Gold, it can help out the power bill by performing more efficiently (and not drawing an excessive amount of power from the outlet). Being fully modular means it should make cable management a lot easier. The cables are sleeved, giving it a better aesthetic appeal than most power supplies. Lastly, with four PCI-e power cables you should be good to go with CrossfireX or SLI.

ADATA SP600 245GB SSD ($106): We also found great deals on SSDs, including a 245GB SSD from ADATA. With prices dropping, solid-state drives have become common place in our PC builds. Now, for just over $100, you get a decent-sized, speedy drive to dramatically lower load times with fast 4KB random read/writes up to 55,000/36,000 IOPS.

PNY XLR8 240GB SSD ($95): In my opinion, this is one of the best deals out there right now. It's rare that we can find a 240GB SSD for less than $100. PNY is well-known as a manufacturer of memory, and they've done pretty well with SSDs and Video Cards as well. While not being one of the fastest SSDs out there, the XLR8 has a SandForce controller and is SATA 6Gb/s enabled. With 4KB random read/write speeds up to 60,000 IOPS, it is slightly faster than the previous SSD. This will be great in gaming builds, and to top it all off, comes with a free 16GB flash drive.

XFX Double Dissipation R9 290X ($350): With the recent release of the new NVIDIA 900 series video cards at very competitive prices, AMD has a great deal going on with their high-end R9 290X cards. The new GTX 970 video cards perform at least on par with the R9 290X, so AMD has lowered their prices to try and regain some of their price to performance advantage. This R9 290X from XFX is a very beefy and powerful video card, with a whopping 2816 Stream Processors and 4GB of GDDR5 memory on a 512-bit interface. You should be able to max-out just about any game effortlessly. The dual-fan heatsink should help alleviate some of the heating issues that come with a GPU with as high a TDP as the R9 290X. This GPU draws a lot of power, so be sure your PSU is large enough to power this hog.

Zotac GeForce GTX 970 GPU ($390): You may be wondering why I am listing this GPU since it is slightly more expensive than most other GTX 970s. I listed this Zotac GTX 970 purely because it is one of the only remaining GTX 970s left in stock as I write this. Since releasing these new Maxwell video cards, they have been selling like hotcakes and for good reason. NVIDIA has found a way to get more power from the CUDA Cores, making this GPU perform up to and even better than the R9 290X. You should be able to play any game at ultra settings with this Zotac card, but you may want to buy it before it sells out, or wait until they restock next week.

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

Michael "Mikagmann2" Mann.