Seven Sizzling Products For Custom Builders

If custom-system builders provide the steak, some key components available to the channel this year can certainly provide some sizzle. As always, there is a lengthy list of peripherals in distribution that provide ever-greater amounts of performance, storage, multimedia and "wow factor." For this report, we've whittled it down to seven that system builders might want to keep on the front burner.

1. Intel's Harpertown LV:

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel's new Xeons in the L5400 lineup go four cores deep—but they only consume 50 watts when in full use. That means a server deployed with this chip can either see a huge performance boost with the same energy consumption over a similar server with older processors, or a huge efficiency boost with the same performance. That gives VARs an opportunity to let customers pick which end of the price/performance scale they want to build toward -- either way, they'll deliver a solid ROI.

2. Intel's Nehalem:

It's not out yet, nor will it be available until much later in 2008, but when it ships, Intel's next-generation processor, code-named "Nehalem," is expected to disrupt the market. Intel says the processor will dynamically scale and manage threads, cores and cache to maximize energy efficiency and performance. Nehalem also will make its debut with a new architecture -- Intel's QuickPath Architecture -- which will include integrated memory and high-speed interconnect for connecting processors and other components. If Intel is right, it will make everything work much better together.

3. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 Desktop HDD:

A single terabyte on the desktop is not yet the sweet spot for the custom system space, but it's only a matter of time. The market share leader, Seagate Technology, of Scotts Valley, Calif., provides the Barracuda 7200.11 Desktop HDD with 1,000 Gbytes of storage. For many power deployments, that will provide a decent amount of headroom for day-to-day use. As hard-drive pricing has faced significant pressure so far in 2008, this may be an opportunity to build an inventory of the drives for later in the year.

4. Lite-On LH-2B1S Internal Blu-ray Drive:

So now that Blu-ray has won the war against HD-DVD, to the victor go the spoils, and Lite-On IT, of Fremont, Calif., is one of the winners. The Lite-On LH-2B1S Internal Blu-ray Drive plays regular Blu-ray discs in bright, vibrant high-definition glory and writes to standard CD-DVD drives. While the drive doesn't write to Blu-ray discs, that may actually be attractive to enterprises that don't wish to have employees copying entire databases onto a thin disk.

5. AMD Phenom:

Also known as Advanced Micro Device's "50 Series," the Phenom processors are designed to be socket-compatible with the earlier AM2, so VARs can deliver upgrades and migrate to a higher-end processor without having to re-align their motherboard inventories. The Phenom X3 8000 series are triple-core x86 microprocessors and the glitch that plagued earlier Phenoms is gone. For system builders and resellers who seek to deliver a choice of processing platforms apart from Intel's, the Phenom is up there.

6. AMD 780G Chipset:

This is an eighth-generation integrated graphics processor, and its high level of integration and scalability lets manufacturers offer revolutionary performance and capabilities. AMD touts a number of features in the 780G: It's the first AMD chipset with integrated digital DisplayPort output; it supports up to 12 USB 2.0 connections; it comes with 6 AHCI based SATA 3.0 Gbps ports with eSATA capability; also, it has HD audio, a Unified Video Decoder (UVD), a single x16 PCIe Gen 2, a DVI/HDMI interface and internal or external TMDS.

7. NVIDIA 780i Ultra SLI:

Nvidia's SLI chipset technology can turbocharge a system built with, say, an Intel high-end, Core 2 Extreme Quad Core processor that is well positioned for 3-D, video rendering or gaming. SLI is the Santa Clara, Calif.-based vendor's proprietary architecture that allows for parallel processing in graphics applications and breaks up some existing performance bottlenecks. The 780i SLI media and communications processor (MCP) was designed to work with Intel's Yorkfield and provides a combination that delivers killer performance.

Brian Sheinberg contributed to this report