Week of June 14, 2009

“Today we are looking at two cards, the XFX HD 4890 Black Edition and Zotac’s GTX285 Infinity. Both are each respective manufacturer’s fastest single core offerings and bring several improved features to the table. The XFX Black Edition contains a 1GHz core (150MHz increase over the reference card) while the Zotac GTX285 Infinity is supplied with increased clock speeds and a preinstalled waterblock for unmatched thermal performance.”

You would be hard pressed to find visual shortcomings with the ViewSonic VX2433wm. With a resolution of 1920x1080 you are able to display the latest HD content, something the majority of smaller monitors are not capable of. The monitor's visual qualities are complimented by being able to connect via all three of the most popular connections; HDMI, DVI and VGA.

"The Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme True Black CPU Heatsink arrived Technic3D. The CPU Cooler with 6 Heatpipes and Stack of 52 pieces of black Alu fins. See you in the following Review the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme True Black compared with the True Cooper on a Intel Core i7 920."

"We're looking at ECS's card that has indeed been tweaked from the stock Nvidia card, sporting a nice little cooler and 1GB of DDR3, not to mention a die shrink to 55nm from the 65nm on the 9800GTX. It looks like ECS is really pushing the entry-level market with this card, showing a few enhancements that promise some very good performance for the price. Yes, there are some important differences to spot here, so let's take a closer look and see what it means in terms of your gaming satisfaction."

Not that long ago, in a country right below us, there was a case being designed. This case was built for precision cooling and for destroying large moon shaped space stations. Ok so you won’t be taking down the death star with this case, but it would be one step closer to making the dream come true. Just like the star fighter of the same name, the In-Win X-Fighter is fine tuned machine, designed for intimidating good looks and for completing the ultimate mission of any star wars fan boy. Let’s dive in and take a closer look at this great gaming case:

With new components like graphics cards and CPU's becoming bigger hogs of electricity, you need a new PSU that will hold up to all the added stress of high powered components. A power supply may be an afterthought, but when your current one dies because you overloaded it, then you'll think otherwise. This overload on the PSU could also lead to other components being blown in the PSU's last hurrah. This could potentially leave you with hundreds of dollars in fried equipment.

"When it came to overclocking, the Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P was a breeze. Because of the options available and the tweaking control, I was able to push every ounce that I could get out of it - which was pretty decent. By just playing with the multiplier and bus speed, I was able to push the Phenom II X4 955 processor to just under 3.9GHz at the maximum voltage of 1.5 volts. I started by pushing the multiplier to the maximum I could get stable, which was x18.5 and then started upping the Bus speed 1MHz at a time until I became unstable. Ultimately I ended up with a 650MHz increase with little effort at all. I was also able to get the memory to just under 1400MHz with low timings of 7-7-7-20-1T and everything was benchmark stable. So the overclocked tests will be run at 3.858GHz."

From a performance point of view, if you're looking for the fastest card there really isn't much choice but to go with the GeForce GTX295 as it offers blistering performance in the latest games with the highest resolutions and settings enabled. EVGA offers excellent support with Lifetime Warranty, Toll-Free Technical Support 24/7 and the 90 day Step Up Program that can't be beat. Buy two of these cards and you'll have the ultimate in performance bar none. One thing to note is the card is $549.99 online, making it expensive but if you want uncompromising performance sometimes you have to pay the price. EVGA also offers Crazy Machines 2 and you get Call Of Duty: World At War if you purchase this card from Newegg. Overall this is one fast card that qualifies for our Hot Product Award, if it had been one of the faster overclocked versions it would have won an Editor's Choice.

While it seems like every company makes an active RAM cooling fan these days, Corsair has decided to take things up a notch. The Ice T30 sub-ambient cooling system is the first of its kind and made specifically for Corsair's enthusiast grade memory. It features a TEC and accommodations for liquid cooling.

"Corsair HX850W is a power supply with modular cabling system and high-end components promising up to 90% efficiency, launched to compete with Antec Signature series and Seasonic M12D series. Let's see if it survives our tests."

"The Fusion 550RF is manufactured by Seasonic for Arctic Cooling and it is internally identical to Corsair VX450W and Antec Earthwatts 500W power supplies. The strange thing about these internally identical power supplies is that the Wattage power ratings are all different. Between the three companies a 100W rating difference is observed, which is pretty crazy no matter where you live or with whom your brand loyalty lies. After a little bit of research it appears that Arctic Cooling rated their power supply at 550W due to that being the peak power rating. This is not something we ever like to see as most other name brand companies don't rate their power supplies like this. The power supply label on the Fusion 550RF says that it can handle 550W loads for a maximum of one full second, so when shopping for power supplies this one is more in the range of a competitor's 450W-500W power supply..."

"The new iPhone 3G S is finally released from Apple and we got our hands on one this morning. We've played around with it and so far we really like what we are seeing. For users of the iPhone 3G, you probably won't find any need to upgrade, but iPhone v1 or non-iPhone users will want to take a really good look at the 3G S. It offers some really nice enhancements to the iPhone line bringing it up to par with many other smartphone devices on the market. The "S" in the name stands for speed, and the 3G S is the fastest smartphone we've ever seen."

The Gladiator 600 is another entry into the fray what some may call the "mainstream case market". We tear the case down from all angles to let you know if it can keep up with today's expectations and deserves the Gladiator name and if it is a worthy evolution from the Centurion.

AMD sent us another one of their latest cpu´s, we got a sample of their Phenom 2 955 which should prove to be the AMD´s current badboy. We are going to compare it vs the 940 cpu and vs a older Intel cpu in various tests. Lets take a closer look and see what we can expect for these 245$ that you end up paying for this unit.

GlacialTech has come up with a very interesting design for their newest heatsink. The device goes by the name of UFO V51 Silent, they also offer a PWM version which has higher speed fans. The heatsink uses a combination of four large heatpipes, dual 93mm fans and a mirror finish base to combine for a very unique heatsink.

Gaming headsets are getting better and better all the time. With companies like SteelSeries pumping out performance headsets the overall gaming experience seems to be improving. Comfort is the single most important part of a gaming headset, if you are going to spend hours playing the headset better be comfortable. A very close second of course would be over all sound and speech quality. We will be delving deep into this headset review and see if it is really worth dropping extra coin on a performance headset like the SteelSeries Siberia Neckband Headset. Let’s get a closer look:

" The Kingwin 1220W Mach 1 is a unit that's marketed for enthusiasts (particularly gamers), has a price tag to beat several top name-brand competitors, and sports some nice features including pin-coded modular cabling and LED lighting. Certainly looks promising, so let's get down to business and juice up this unit."

“In our test lab arrived very interesting motherboard signed by BIOSTAR. Actually it is not just another motherboard, but very interesting one. Its official name is 945GC-330 and it has integrated graphics card, LAN and sound card which isn’t that big deal, but integrated CPU is. This motherboard is based on Intel Atom CPU and it is made in Mini-ITX size (17x17cm or 6.7x6.7inches). This means that you can make a “desktop” configuration based on Atom CPU, but let’s start from the beginning…”

“Corsair's HX series of power supplies are considered to be some of the best an enthusiast can purchase. We reviewed the HX620W and the HX1000W months ago and found them to be excellent products, among the best in their respective categories even today. But with an end user limited by the choice between a 620W and a 1kW unit there has been a huge gap between these two products. In order to fill that gap Corsair recently released two more HX series units, the HX750W and the HX850W. Today we will review the larger and more promising of the two newly released models - the HX850W, a product loaded with features and boasting some very strict specifications.”

"When buying a hard disk drive most users are only concerned with the drive's capacity. Should you also care about performance? We compared the performance of 12 1 TB SATA-300 hard disk drive models from Seagate, Samsung and Western Digital. Is there a big performance difference among them? If so, which is the fastest 1 TB disk in the market? Check it out!"

If you've ever visited Benchmark Reviews in the past, you've probably noticed that we've tested a large collection of NAS products. At the same time, you might have noticed how many of these products aren't really geared towards home users needing just the basics. That's where the QNAP TS-119 comes in handy. Designed to hold a single SATA drive (HDD or SSD), the TS-119 can deliver all the great features of larger more expensive NAS products. The latest Enterprise-level NAS servers feature iSCSI expansion, RAID redundancy, and Gigabit Ethernet connectivity, and surprisingly the TS-119 does these things too, but without the expensive price tag. How can a single-drive NAS offer RAID you ask? In this article Benchmark Reviews takes the QNAP TS-119 through a tough set of p! erformance tests while we outline the Turbo NAS functions and features.

"Our tests prove the good quality of the new X-Fi Titanium family. These cards are honestly positioned for gamers now, being the best choice in this category. PCI Express itself does not give any benefits to the cards. But X-Fi Titaniums, owing to Creative's efforts, provide extra protection from cracking, which was a serious problem with previous X-Fi PCI cards."

"XFX Radeon HD 4770 review also featuring the Gainward Radeon HD 4850. The XFX Radeon HD 4770 has a 17% higher clock speed, 38% higher memory speed but 20% less Pixel Shaders compared to the Gainward Radeon HD 4850. The XFX Radeon HD 4770 does have a disadvantage which is the 128Bit Memory Interface which is half that of the Gainward Radeon HD 4850. How will this effect the performance?"

It seems when CPU coolers are designed these days appearance is the main concern for the designers. The one with the most lights or copper on display steals all the attention. What happened to the old days? Competition is your answer my friend. In the computing industry nowadays, there are many companies manufacturing OEM CPU coolers. Smaller companies are then buying these OEM’s, shoving an LED fan or two on and rebranding them. And the sad thing is, is that we’re buying them! One such company who is very against this is Scythe. Scythe design all their own CPU coolers, they’re completely unique! Today we have a cooler for review from Scythe, the Mugen 2, alike many of Scythe’s products, this one too is beefy but basic in bling, let’s see how this bad boy performs…

The NZXT Beta is an extremely affordable enclosure with a sub 50 US Dollar price tag. We take a close look at the case to see if any corners were cut to keep the price down or if NZXT managed to combine usabilty, a solid feature set with that low, low price tag. In other words: will it come across as cheap or affordable?

And to top it all off ... Noctua's SecuFirm2™ is designed to give optimal contact pressure and easy, straightforward installation. The SecuFirm2™ is an enthusiast-grade mounting system that meets the highest demands in safety, performance and ease-of-use.

In the past we have used hard drive docking stations to help for with the ease of swapping in and out hard drives without the hassle of tearing down a computer or even installing it inside an enclosure. Most of these docking stations that I have seen in the past had small simple features, but most were the similar if not almost the same. Well with the Kingwin EZ-Dock 2 HDD Docking Station you can have up to two 2.5” and/or 3.5” hard drives installed at the same time. Let’s take a closer look to see how well this would help those computer techs looking for an easier way to backup a client’s hard drives:

Patriot's new multi-layer Torqx SSD features the Indilinx 'Barefoot' controller, and promises some very fast performance numbers, particularly with Write operations. The Torqx is the latest in their product lineup, and the performance claims sound impressive. We’ll pit it against some of the fastest traditional hard disk drives, and also alongside Intel's renowned X-25M SSD, and see if this Patriot Torqx SSD has the horsepower to keep pace with the front runners.

Antec has tried to make the P180 series of cases a universal design that would suit just about any individual’s tastes. It’s relatively simple and classy appearance means that it would look at home on just about anyone’s desk and Its tried and tested internal design and cooling layout means that it is often considered by enthusiasts and mainstream buyers alike.

“Recently we tested the Sapphire 4890 Vapor-X which offers a slight improvement over the reference model with a modest overclock and a custom cooling solution. Today however we will be taking a look at the real powerhouse that Sapphire have on offer, the HD 4890 Atomic.”

"Topower is a traditional OEM manufacturer, being the real manufacturer behind units from brands like Tagan and OCZ (not all power supplies from OCZ are manufactured by Topower, though). They also sell power supplies using their own brand and today we are going to review their PowerBird 900 W unit, which uses a full modular cabling system and is based on a two-transformer design. Let's see whether this is a good unit or not."

The moment is almost finally here, Intel's true answer to AMD's socket AM3. It would seem like more cooler manufacturers would be touting the fact that their coolers are compatible with the new socket. Finally we have one, the Cooler Master Hyper TX3! While it's too early to test this beast on a socket 1156 board, we can still get an idea on how it will perform on current generation processors, in this case the Athlon X2 7850 BE. But enough talk about future CPU's. What about CPU's out now? Well, you're in luck, the Hyper TX3 supports all recent sockets, dating back to K8 CPU's.

This review will focus on an SDHC (Secure Digital High Capacity) card from Patriot Memory. This card can be used like any other SDHC card, but it also includes software that allows the user to automatically back up their data. The Patriot Duplicator SDHC card is available in 8GB, 16GB and 32GB sizes, and we will be taking a look at the 16GB version.

The new Baram from Thermolab has all the signs of being one of the better coolers on the market. It has five heat pipes, support for dual 120mm cooling fans and even the what I believe to be the proper size and weight. The Baram is compatible with current CPU sockets from Intel and AMD, except for socket 1366. What impresses me the most is the build quality of the cooler. Will size and build quality make this a good performer? We will see.

The Audio-Technica ATH-AD700s headphones surprise with their unusual appearance and performance. Outperforming most of the competitors in its price range these headphones are quite a treat to anyone looking for a set of $100 headphones.

CLICK HERE FOR Audio-Technica ATH-AD700 PRICING & SHOPPING

We'll start with what Tuniq has done right. The Ripper 1000W is a good looking unit; clean finish, sleeved cables with matching heatshrink, connectors and fan grill. The unit comes with plenty of molex connectors and the cables have quite a bit of length in them. In terms of performance, the Ripper finds itself placed comfortably in the middle of the pack- while there are better units available, it outperforms plenty others. Still, all around good performance.

CLICK HERE FOR Tuniq Ripper 1000W Power Supply PRICING & SHOPPING

Coolermaster is one of the most notable manufacturer of coolers and computer cases. Today we will have a look at Coolermaster HAF 922 computer case which is a combination of high quality, cool looking and innovative cooling solutions.

CLICK HERE FOR Coolermaster HAF 922 PRICING & SHOPPING

"This is the first point-n-shoot camera that I have worked with extensively in about three years as I have been using a DSLR exclusively. Before that, I owned a few Nikon and Olympus point-n-shoot cameras and have had some brief shooting time with a Canon and Kodak camera in the past year or so, neither of which I was terribly impressed with. Of course, it would be foolish to think the FX150 would outperform the DSLR so I won't exactly be comparing the two side by side here today. I have, however, been looking for a nice point-n-shoot unit to carry around with me at all times and I aim to find out if the FX150 is a worthy contender in that category."

If you like music and you like to wear headbands, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want a Halo Headband. Once you have the speakers properly positioned and once you are wearing the Halo Headband you don’t even notice that they are any different from any other headband you might wear. I was actually quite impressed by the sound quality of the little speakers that come with it. While not having the sound quality of super high end audiophile headphones, these are definitely near the top of my list f good sounding headphones. Because of the flat design of the speakers I found that there was no pressure on my ears and found that wearing the Halo Headband was quite comfortable. I found them to be so comfortable that I actually was able to fall asleep quite easily even while lying down. Let’s take a closer look at this unique headband:

CLICK HERE FOR Halo Headphones PRICING & SHOPPING

External storage systems have really hit it off in recent years with people wanting to transfer more and more data from one computer to another. The enclosures have evolved to be very easy to use and able to support IDE and SATA hard drives utilising both USB and eSATA connections. However, with USB performance lagging behind, more and more users are turning to eSATA for its much higher read/write speeds. Let’s take a look at the Eagle Tech Consus T-Series to see what kind of performance it can offer…

CLICK HERE FOR Eagle Tech Consus T-Series PRICING & SHOPPING

“One by one CPU cooler manufacturers have adopted new concept of building heat-pipe coolers: heat-pipes are in direct contact with CPU heat spreader. This solution has proved to be very efficient, or at least more efficient than traditional heat-pipe coolers. Cooler Master, as one of the leading companies on cooling solution market, has also adopted this new trend and as result of their efforts we can present you two new models from Hyper series: TX3 and 212 Plus…”

CLICK HERE FOR Cooler Master Hyper TX3 PRICING & SHOPPING

“In the past few months it has been clear that memory manufacturers have mastered high specification triple channel kits with those like Corsairs Dominator-GT really impressing us. So today we have two more kits on our test bench from OCZ and G.Skill, both of which are capable of running at 2000MHz. Added to this we have a set of memory from Kingston which is one of the few that favours volume over extreme speed, their product gives us three 4GB sticks in one kit for a total of 12GB.”

"Beta is an inexpensive mid-tower case from NZXT yet having several features traditionally found only on high-end models. Let's see if Beta is a good buy."

CLICK HERE FOR NZXT Beta Case PRICING & SHOPPING

Samsung whom is one of the world’s largest electronics companies (last time I checked they were indeed number one) has recently introduced plenty new digital camera offerings for 2009 and one of the digital cameras that hope to perform well is ST50. The Samsung ST50, that I am reviewing today, is aimed at portability with Samsung marketing it as being slim enough to fit into your pocket. The ST50 is an ultra-slim (16.6mm wide) stylish 12.2MP camera that is ideal for individuals who are looking for an easy-to-use pocket-sized digital camera and something that looks elegant.

With gaming mice constantly being the focus for aim and precision, mouse pads are easily overlooked. After spending $40 to $60 on a gaming mouse, spending an additional $10-$20 on a mouse pad may seem more like a chore than a necessity. Unfortunately, your brand new shiny mouse can only do so much. A high DPI mouse will perform best with a high DPI accepting mouse pad. A cheap cloth pad will work just fine, but the real potential of your mouse will forever be hidden. Gamers know what gamers want, and that is exactly why Razer has released so many good products. Along with their mice, they've also released many mouse pads including cloth pads, hard surface pads, dual sided pads, and now an incredibly thin $15 pad, the Sphex.

When putting together a mobile PC, the monitor is a big consideration. For use in the car, a touchscreen monitor is especially important. Lilliput Electronics Co. has dedicated itself to solving our mobile PC monitor dilemmas by providing flexible touchscreen monitors. The screens are the perfect size for car computing, or for any number of other uses. The Lilliput EBY701-NP/C/T model 7-Inch Touchscreen Monitor is the company's newest 7" monitor and boasts a new adjustable LED backlight design for a crisper, clearer picture, especially in sunlight. Benchmark Reviews is ready to bring you all the information you need to know about this monitor in order to make a decision about it for your mobile computing needs.

"Instead of releasing a longer 850 W power supply, Antec decided to build a taller unit. Because of it is bigger, CP-850 only fits a few cases from Antec (Twelve Hundred, P183 and P193). Is it a better solution that regular-sized units? Let's see."

CLICK HERE FOR Antec CP-850 Power Supply PRICING & SHOPPING

The card is cooled by Sapphire's Vapor-X custom cooling which as mentioned above, should do an excellent job of cooling the GPU. Other great features include the inclusion of Black Diamond chokes which give 25% more power efficiency, and full Japanses solid capacitors. These features help improve the reliability, stability and longevity of the card, especially during overclocking.

Every modern motherboard comes with an embedded Flash EEPROM module, otherwise known as the BIOS chip. Short for Basic Input Out System, this is the first bit of code executed when you boot your PC. The BIOS stores all kinds of essential information about your system, such as your CPU's clockspeed, the size and type of RAM you're running, the boot order of your media, what onboard devices are present, and much, much more. An improperly configured BIOS can prevent Windows (or Linux) from loading, while a finely tuned BIOS has the potential to significantly improve performance over that of a similarly spec'd machine.

"Today, we have a special treat for our readers. Our very first SLC NAND Flash based Solid State Drive review! The recently released OCZ Vertex EX is designed to deliver unparalleled performance and reliability, featuring the latest-generation architecture and SATA interface utilizing single-level cell NAND flash memory for unmatched overall system responsiveness and stability for enterprise grade server solutions. With speeds up to a 260MB/s read and 210MB/s write, the Vertex EX series is clearly one of the fastest drives that money can buy today...."

CLICK HERE FOR OCZ Vertex EX Series 120GB PRICING & SHOPPING

Lenovo is a company that offers a wide range of notebooks. >From multimedia notebooks, to gaming notebooks, to value notebooks to netbooks, Lenovo has their bases adequately covered. We've spent some time with a few of the company's prior offerings, but we've never quite seen a product like this. The simplistic G530 is a computer that's easily overlooked. It's not flashy, the model name isn't memorable and the specification sheet has nothing on it that will immediately grab your attention. But what this machine lacks in pizzazz it makes up for in value, so it follows logic that the G530 is a critical pillar in the somewhat undercover Value '3000' notebook line at Lenovo.

CLICK HERE FOR Lenovo G530 Notebook PRICING & SHOPPING

Sony are one of the world’s largest media companies, producing some of the best selling and highest quality media and entertainment electronics products on the market. Many of you reading this probably own Sony hardware - whether it is a digital camera, television, computer, or even a Playstation gaming console and I’m certain you will agree when we say that they offer some of the finest electronics available to consumers.

The case is the Phoenix Neo, which is a remake of the older Phoenix released about three years ago. The front of the newer model has been slightly redone to a more modern look. The Neo seems aimed at the gamer looking for a fresh, new stylish look, while still being functional. The total opposite of gaming cases we have seen from Coolermaster, Antec and Silverstone. Speaking of functionality, one of the key features of the Neo is the huge 25cm monster fan on the side panel. Lets take a closer look at the new Phoenix Neo.

Toshiba has a big plan with the SpursEngine as it will be incorporated into various hardware from laptops, desktop add-on cards, digital cameras, and digital camcorders. It is also possible to use the processor in an environment that requires large-volume HD image processing, and hand/face gesture recognition. In fact, Toshiba Notebook PC and Qosmio G50 haves already included such technology.

"You can literally talk all day on the new Samsung Magnet (SGH-A257), a slab phone with a full QWERTY keyboard available from AT&T. In our informal tests, we got eight and a half hours of talk time, by far the most battery-powered conversation we've ever pulled out of a cell phone. Mind you, extensive talk time is great, but today people do a lot more with a cell phone than just chat. And the Magnet lacks a lot of the basic non-verbal niceties (e.g. 3G connectivity, music playback, etc.) that can be found on Samsung's own Propel, refurb versions of which are available for the same price ($19.95)."

"Today we are going to test two 9xx series processors including the new flagship Phenom II X4 955. To differentiate new processors from the older models supporting DDR2, the number "5" is added to their index. For example, the model 945 differs from the former flagship (model 940) only by DDR3 support (and a locked multiplier)."

Right now SSD drives are one hot commodity in the PC industry at large and with more and more companies jumping on the band wagon it will not be long before these new drives become the mainstay of storage. They will most likely be used as your boot drive in which you're OS is installed, making for less chances of data loss. At the moment these drives are easily available up to a 160GB capacity and are a bit on the pricey stage in a drifting economy, but really do offer new advancements in storage technology. Whenever something is new to market it is this way and we will see prices drop as the market becomes flooded with various SSD products in the future, for now, you wanna play, you gotta pay. One thing to note since his drive is not a magnetic drive it does not need to be defragged as that will possibly result in damage to the SSDs memory chips.

"Today we’ll be looking at such a set of memory modules, the OCZ Blade Series 6GB kit of DDR3-2000 modules, which are currently one of OCZ’s most expensive offerings to date, with a sleek new design for the heatspreaders to boot. Come on, we must insist on great looking aesthetics if we are paying a premium price. Anyways, what about performance? In our world, Performance is King, so today we’ll found out if these OCZ Blade sticks are king or peasant."

Prior to our 33-Way Thermal Compound Comparison article published back in March 2008, there had not been another project of its size available online. So when Benchmark Reviews revealed our test results, it was a surprise to find that many overclockers had been ill-informed by marketing hype and misleading enthusiast opinions. Benchmark Reviews later published several other complimentary articles for performance hardware enthusiasts, offering an instructional guide on Thermal Paste Application Methods and testing for the Best CPU Cooler Performance. As the author to both of those articles, I have discovered that the most critical factors pertaining to thermal cooling performance seems to be overlooked. In this massive follow-up article, which was built from entirely new project data taking over one year of research to publish, our collection of test material has grown to include every product we could acquire from the marketplace. Benchmark Reviews has received advice of industry experts, manufacturers, and elite overclockers to bring you this comprehensive 80-Way Thermal Interface Material cooling performance comparison benchmark test.

"We matched the Thecus N3200PRO against two other home-oriented units from D-Link and Cavalry and the Thecus unit walked away a winner by a huge margin in all categories. The only advantage the 2-drive units have is in the single-disk category, one that the N3200PRO does not support. In all fairness though, it must be noted the D-Link DNS-323 is about half the price of the N3200PRO. We also included the business-class servers from Synology and QNAP so we could get a feel for how well the N3200PRO faired in the RAID 5 category. While it didn't beat it's competition, it came very close to the DS408. Once you take into account those units cost anywhere from two to three times that of the N3200PRO, the results are even more noteworthy."

While SSDs may be a dime a dozen, there are very few drives out there that could be counted as a viable alternative to the ages-old hard disk drive. Stutter issues as well as general performance pitfalls have kept these expensive products to niche markets instead of making serious inroads as people’s OS drives. G.Skill’s Falcon series promises to rectify all that. But can it?

“With its HD 4890 model ATI raise a lot of dust and made huge impact on graphics card market. Despite the fact that this card should have been “just” optimized Radeon HD 4870, it was much, much more than that. RV790 is capable of withstanding frequencies that were unimaginable for “old” RV770, and just the fact that it can operate at 1GHz is completely different story. It is clear that this kind of overclocking freedom made this card a very interesting purchase for all enthusiasts…”

The tower format cooler with multi-heatpipes and large fin stacks has been a triumph for thermal solution companies alike far replacing the more traditional top-down cooler. One such company which still believes in the performance of this style of cooler and for its greater compatibility in smaller cases is Noctua. Their cooling solutions have earned them a highly regarded name and one such product that has contributed to this is their NH-C12P CPU cooler featuring a whopping 6 heatpipes and fins emanating directly from the base. Let’s see if the performance can keep up with the newer tower coolers which now dominate the market.

"A few days ago I took a look at the NZXT Guardian 921 PC case, today I’ve got another from NZXT as well, the Beta. The Beta chassis is meant to be more of a budget case, coming in at around $50, but it’s got features of more expensive cases and overall it’s a very nice case. The Beta features a tool-less installation for the optical and hard drives, enough room for four fans to keep things cool, and it’s very aesthetically pleasing. So without further chatter from me, read on to learn more about an excellent case from NZXT… "

It seems an eternity since the last time Corsair released a modular power supply in their high performance HX line of units, and there has been a good deal of speculation around the net on when Corsair was going to finally release something in the 750W-850W range to better compete with the likes of the Seasonic M12D and Antec Signature units at that level.

I myself look at what that manufacturer uses for a heatsink on their video card. Yes, getting extra software, having an overclocked video card are all niceties but what's the point in getting a video card when you might need to spend an extra 30-50 dollars on top of your video card for a good GPU cooler that will make sure the video card stays cool at all times. Not to mention the possibilities of 'WHAT IF' that GPU cooler does not properly work, or gets installed wrong, what then?

From a platform point of view the Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P motherboard fits the bill as a motherboard that supports AMD's latest CPUs on the AM3 platform including the 810 we used for this review. Features-wise this board has all of the features that an enthusiast will want from a new AM3 motherboard except for one. For those expecting to run three or four ATI cards in CrossfireX mode will be disappointed as this board only has two PCI Express x16 slots but that is not the target audience of this board.

“Overall the Glacialtech X-Wing Notebook Cooler is an undisputed winner in the looks department, however not so much in the cooling department. The quality of the build and innovative features built-in to the front panel make it very user friendly. Unfortunately because of the lack of cooling power, it's very hard for me to recommend this. I just know that geeks with gaming laptops love lights and gadgets and they'll be wanting to add this under their hot laptops. However it would do little good. The cooling power is anemic. My suggestion to Glacialtech would be to dramatically beef up the cooling system with something like a large, quiet 200mm fan centered in the unit.”

In this review, we'll be a look at the OCZ Vertex Series 120Gb SSD. It's based on MLC NAND Flash technology which provides an enhanced level of performance in terms of faster read/write speeds. It features a new architecture and controller design with 64MB of onboard cache. It offers a blistering read speed of 250Mb/sec and a write speed of upto 180Mb/sec. What's more it's shock resistant (1500G), supports RAID and comes with 2 years warranty.

Hardwareoverclock.com has reviewed another video card. Last week they has take a look at the Sapphire Radeon HD4770, a midrange video card under 100,- Euro. Is the performance enough for actually games and high resolutions?

We all know Kingwin for having quality products at an affordable price. They are also one of the pioneers in designing a Direct Heat Pipe CPU coolers. When I first heard of that Kingwin had a new CPU cooler, I had to jump on the chance of testing one of there CPU coolers. The XT-1264 CPU cooler by Kingwin has the look and feel of a Quality CPU cooler supposed to have. The next question is, will this CPU cooler be able to perform as well as it looks? Lets find out, on an already proven bullet proof CPU also one of the hottest ones, the unforgiving Intel C2Q Q6600.