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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Tuesday, August 12, 2008
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QNAP wowed ThinkComputers a while back with its TS-109 Pro NAS, a small, aluminum-cased, single-drive unit. QNAP has grown quite a bit since then, and recently released a larger unit for its small business and corporate users, the TS-409U. The TS-409U is a quadruple bay rackmount NAS with support for up to 4 TB of space in a variety of storage configurations, including RAID5 and RAID6. Its variety of server software, including a full LAMP stack and printer server, can provide usefulness and utility to users at all levels of technical know-how and work goals.
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Monday, August 11, 2008
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When the courier came and dropped off the box on my doorstep a short while ago, my brother asked me what I was going to review now. I told him that it was an unlocked Palm Centro. He immediately responded by asking, "Palm still makes cell phones?"
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First we had the Destructor mouse pad which got the ok, than we had the Lycosa keyboard which im typing this article on and now it's time for another Razer product. I'm looking at their latest headphones called the Piranha gaming communicator.
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The HD 4850 is the card that has put AMD/ATI back on the graphics card map over the past month. While the HD 3850 and HD 3870 were both good cards, a constant line-up of NVIDIA cards along with price drops meant that the aging technology was having trouble keeping up with cards not only in a similar price bracket, but cheaper again. The latest HD 4850 to come into the labs is from GIGABYTE and before we get stuck into the performance side of things, we will have a look at the package and what's inside as well as the card itself. So, let's not ramble on anymore and just get stuck into it.
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We?ve seen a lot of fan controller designs here on rbmods.com, everything from simple knobs to more elaborate controllers. Today we get a chance to look at a new fan controller from NZXT, the NZXT Sentry LX High Performance Fan Controller. Will this product live up to its ?high performance? claims? That is what we?re here to find out in this review.
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OCZ have made the boldest move lately with the release of their new Core Series SSD drives. The OCZ Core Series not only uses the latest SLC technology (which is currently the fastest commercial design), but their retail prices are half any other similar SSD drive at the time of their launch. The Core Series drives are currently available in capacities ranging from 32GB to 128GB. We will take a look at the 64GB version of the product in this review.
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Akasa has taken the Mirage-62 case and has updated it using thick aluminum panels, adding air vents which also can be used for water cooling units and a stylish new front door. The mid-tower case features loads of space and some clever design choices to make it big enough for even the largest power supplies and longest graphics cards.
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The midrange to high end motherboard market is filled with products. These 'high-midrange' boards are very popular among enthusiasts for its abundance of features, performance, and a not-too-out-of-the-world price tags. Sure, boards like the Asus Striker II NSE are really good, but not everyone can justify all the extra fancy features for the price. As major motherboard companies love to compete in this area, a significant array of boards are made based on the collection of latest chipsets -- for example, both Gigabyte and Asus have a ton of Intel P45 chipset based motherboards ranging from just over $100 all the way to over $250. Today, we'll take a look at Gigabyte's high end P45 board -- the Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 -- as the name suggests, it has Gigabyte's Dynamic Energy Saver, 100% solid state capacitors, and "Quad Bios, Quad Cooling, Quad E-SATA2, Quad Triple Phase, Quad-Core Optimized, Quad DDR2 Slots". We've already taken a look at the quad-quad-quad-quad-quad-quad Gigabyte X48T-DQ6 a few months back. The Gigabyte EP45-DQ6 is loaded with features and carrying a $250 price tag at press time, so let's see how this beast steps up against the competition.
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As enthusiasts build high-end computers which require more and more power for the multiple processors, multiple graphics cards, and multiple hard drives in these rigs, power supply manufacturers, such as Cooler Master, churn out power supplies with increasingly higher wattage to handle these power-thirsty devices. Cooler Master sent ThinkComputers the next generation of its Real Power Pro series, the six-12V-railed 1250W monster with enough connectors and juice to power just about anything one could throw at it.
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The first chipset to come out in the 7 series was the 780G, the first with the next generation in onboard graphics along with HT3 support for the Phenom processors. AMD really outdid themselves; not only was it future proof, it finally introduced a good onboard graphics accelerator. GIGABYTE has been one of the biggest producers of motherboards along with ASUS and MSI. And one thing is for certain with these three companies; above all else, if the chipset is good, you will find at least one board based on it. Today we are looking at the GIGABYTE GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard. How does it stack up as a HTPC board? Let's have a good look.
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The battle for your netbook dollar has just gotten one notch higher with the introduction of the Gigabyte M912, a Vista-based touchscreen machine that's all ready for touching.
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Intel's latest performance desktop chipset is now the X48 Express, but there still is life left in the X38 Express, which was released late last year. The Intel X38 and X48 Chipsets share many of the same features including support for the latest dual-core and quad-core Intel processors, DDR3 system memory support, and 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 interfaces with there being very few differences to the end-user between these chipsets. In addition, benchmarks we have delivered from different motherboards have shown the X48 has little to no performance improvements over the older Bearlake chipset. ASUS's X38 motherboards are still very much in the market place and today we happen to be looking at one of their workstation motherboards based around the X38. The motherboard we are looking at is the ASUS P5E64 WS Professional, which ships with all of the usual ASUS innovations in addition to having four PCI Express x16 slots.
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Gigabyte tends to release many motherboards on the same chipset and the X48 is no exception with no less than four X48 motherboards currently on their website. The X48T-DQ6 supports all of the latest Intel Core 2 Quad/Extreme/Duo CPUs and also supports the older Prescott CPUs which some motherboards don't due to the VRM 11.1 specification. The qualified memory support on the board is rather light as to their Qualified Vendor List on their website, with the lack of Samsung DDR3 memory above 1066MHz and no Crucial memory support on the QVL list at all though both companies' memory worked great when I tried them. Not exactly an Editor's Choice due to its lack of DDR3 support, but it is a Hot Product as it still has plenty of available options that make it worth taking a look at.
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The Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 USB-Headset arrived Technic3D. Technic3D will see as good they are with eight speakers against a Stereo Headset with two speakers.
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In the real world not everyone can afford the high end graphics cards that we generally review here on DriverHeaven. While it is interesting to see just what Nvidia and ATI are capable of delivering without limitations a portion of our audience have been asking us for a sub £70 roundup for a while.
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