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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Monday, May 26, 2008
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The last while, we've reviewed portable 2.5 inch USB drives from both Maxtor (OneTouch 4 Mini) and Buffalo (MiniStation TurboUSB). Both units were solid performers and seemed to bring their own unique features to the table. This time, we've managed to snag one of Western Digital's new MyPassport Elite 2.5 inch Portable USB Hard Drives. The Elite gives us a unique enclosure with a soft-touch finish and an innovative external capacity gauge. It comes in capacities of 250GB and 320GB and is backed up by a 5 year warranty. Let's check it out!
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Today we will be looking at a 9600GT from PNY which comes in under the Verto naming scheme. While this might sound like some form of OC series, it isn't. Verto is simply what PNY choose to call their graphics card line-up. It still carries the same one-slot profile, but we have a smaller fan that sits on the left of the card as opposed to the right. The shape of the cooler is also slightly different to the standard cooler.
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The bundle and support are very well with the XFX Black Edition GeForce 9800GTX, it comes with COD4, which is one of the hottest PC gaming titles available at this moment and costs around $49.95 at most e-tailors or retailers making the card a more attractive buy. Support and warranty options are well taken care of BY XFX as they take very good care of their customers in the after purchase environment and quick RMA return times. Overall this card is a solid piece of equipment that excels in the 1920X1200 and below resolutions with moderate AA and AF settings. In the 1680 and 1280 resolutions you can turn up the AA and AF settings to their maximum values and get great FPS gameplay. Not quite an Editor's Choice, but definitely a Hot Product award winner.
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The AMD Phenom X2 was announced quite some time ago but still hasn't seen the light of day; instead we were greeted by the X3 Phenom, a new breed of processor, first in the market to offer a Triplecore solution. This CPU is priced lower than AMD's own X4 and Intel Core 2 Duo series. In our review today we test the Phenom X3 8450 and compare it to an AMD X4 and Intel C2D.
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The Plantronics Voyager 855 pulls double duty of handling audio calls and listening to music remotely.
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Today I will be looking at one of OCZ's newest power supplies, the EliteXStream 800w PSU. This will be the first OCZ power supply I have reviewed here. OCZ is well known for their high-performance system memory and have been in the power supply business for a while as well. Will the EliteXStream 800 live up to the high expectations I have of OCZ products?
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Unlike their Caviar GP hard drives, the Caviar SE16 drives are performance-grade desktop hard drives. As such, they have platters that spin at full 7200 RPM. Coupled with their use of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), the higher spindle speed allowed the Caviar SE16 to deliver incredibly high transfer rates.
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The MX 5500 was announced back in January at the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where we brought you on-site coverage of each of their five new products. Today I will be taking a look at their latest keyboard / mouse combo and see if they have hit yet another home run in the marketplace.
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Today we will be looking at the APACK ZEROtherm ZEN FZ 120; the latest CPU heatsink and fan combination from the company. Once again, from the outside the cooler looks like many others' designs that have taken over the enthusiast market for the last few years. Let's have a look and see if the ZEN FZ 120 can surprise us like the Hurricane HC92 Cu8800 VGA cooler did in our MEGA 9-Way VGA Roundup back in April.
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The ASUS Nova P20 is a mini console-like desktop PC that looks poised to deliver a multimedia experience for your senses. Clad in a glossy piano black finish and featuring a sleek design, the Nova P20 is definitely eye candy all around. But will it deliver? Details after the jump.
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Imagine this: You are an engineer working at Asus. As a member of the team to design and engineer boards for the company's Republic of Gamer line, you and your team are given a task to create what the world will soon define as the ultimate enthusiast motherboard on the Intel platform. The goal of this project is to make a board that totally dominates the competition in the market as a flagship enthusiast motherboard, which naturally has to be completely-really-uber-1337 in all areas. Did you say performance? Check. Did you say features? Check. How about the looks? We got that covered. Anything else a hardcore computer enthusiast will appreciate? That's quite a challenge -- you got to be creative and imaginative. Fortunately, none of us here at APH Networks works in quite a department that requires such superior engineering skills and imagination at hand. The great thing of being a reviewer is that instead of thinking about what to implement in the design, we were instead given a product as a result of such marvelous work -- the Asus Striker II NSE motherboard, based upon NVIDIA's 790i chipset -- and we can have all the fun in criticizing (And praising, what were you thinking?) the hard work of these people. So we present to you our review of the Asus Striker II NSE motherboard, a product that's based off the Striker II Extreme that the Asus bosses probably told their engineers, "Make the ultimate motherboard. Go absolutely nuts, good luck, have fun." So they did. Just don't pass out when you see the price tag.
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When all the testing was done it was apparent that on the same test machine with the same exact settings on some tests 3-way SLI performed better than Quad SLI did. The tradeoff for 3-way SLI is that not all of the boards out there support it, while many support normal SLI. You also give up all of your expansion ports save one (if you are lucky) when you have three cards in your machine.
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PC Power & Cooling is one of the most reputable high performance PSU manufacturers, if not the most reputable. This good reputation is no doubt helped by them not offering budget products, only mainstream and high end models. When OCZ bought PC P&C nearly a year ago many thought that the quality of their units would somehow degrade however every unit they released since then had an excellent design and really the move to the OCZ camp has had little impact. Today we will take a look on a unit from the Silencer series which is aimed at mainstream users, the Silencer 610W EPS12V. Interestingly the Silencer 610W EPS12V is the first PC P&C unit we have received that clearly mentions OCZ technology on it, let us have a closer look at it and see how good the latest mainstream PC P&C units really are.
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Both the Black Ice GTX and the TFC X-Changer series of radiators are well designed, but it's clear that there's definitely a difference in performance for the price increase. Feser's performance starts off with a nice and cool two degree difference at idle on the 120mm radiator, and though the idle difference shrinks as the sizes increase as we'd expect, the temperature differences at load continues to increase. Looking at either extreme, we have cost vs. performance issues. The TFC X-Changer is almost 50 percent more expensive than the Black Ice at the 120mm level, but we start out two degrees cooler at idle. Granted, most people should not attempt to cool an 8800GTX and a Q66600 CPU on just a 120mm radiator, but it quickly sorts the wheat from the chaff - the TFC X-Changer wins hands down. At the moment it looks like you'll be paying quite heavily for that privilege - however, if you're looking at cooling a lot in a small space and you've already bought into watercooling, it'll be worth the investment without question.
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If you're the kind of motorist who doesn't feel the need to browse family photos, listen to your Think Lizzy catalogue and photograph the wildlife while cruising down the M1 on your hands-free Bluetooth kit, then you could do a lot worse than Blaupunkt's latest sat nav. For this level of functionality you'll need to step up to the company's top-end TravelPilot 300 (£238). However, you should ignore Blaupunkt's 'Back to Basics' marketing slogan as pure guff - the TravelPilot 100 isn't as intuitive as it claims and is left wanting is terms of features compared to products from Garmin and TomTom.
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