Tuesday Reviews

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Even though my previous reviews on Kingston Technology products were about their flash division, Kingston still is very much an enthusiast RAM company. Their HyperX series now comes in DDR3 at very high speeds. While DDR3 is still very new, Kingston offers a kit that runs at a scathing PC3-14400 which is 1800MHz DDR. The KHX14400D3K2 is on the bench for review.

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Kingston Technology produces all kinds of memory including RAM for a computer to flash memory. Kingston is pushing harder and harder into the consumer flash market. Kingston sent over their high speed SD flash memory for review and the SD2/2GB-U is really fast.

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These modules are rated for operation at DDR3-1600 which is PC3-12800 at 1.8V. The modules have SPD values for lower speeds (DDR3-1066) at JEDEC specs to provide boards the needed initial boot to provide the RAM with the proper voltage and timings. The stock timings at DDR3-1600 are 8-8-8-24. DDR3 latencies are very high compared to DDR2 and should only get better in time. These modules are lead free which helps the environment. Nothing like being green in today's world. I almost forgot that the command rate is 1T which means you get an extra performance boost.

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The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, LDAP for short, is a 'fork' of the original X.500 specification for Directory Access Protocol. This X.500 was large and heavy. It also required an OSI protocol stack to run. LDAP was made to be leaner and able to run on top of TCP/IP instead of the OSI complete stack. Active Directory, the directory software that many Windows based enterprise networks use, is LDAP at its heart. Directory services can provide many benefits to a home network or a business. With LDAP setup, it is relatively easy to setup a single sign-on on every computer or have a global address book. The first step is the installation which is very easy on Ubuntu.

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The Honeywell SecuraDrive portable USB hard drive is perfect for storing MP3 music files, videos files and photos, or for protecting sensitive and private data while on the go. Featuring Password Protection Technology, the SecuraDrive allows the user to allocate part or all of the hard drive's capacity to be public or private, with the private areas only accessible with the proper password, regardless if the SecuraDrive is lost or stolen. Benchmark Reviews tests the 80GB SecuraDrive FM-HWS80U2 for modern-day performance and reliability.

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Our latest sticks come to us via Patriot and sport a PC2-6400 sticker on them, they also have this nifty little stamp RoHS Compliant, while not a big deal (yet) in the US, in European countries, without it, it means you can't even sell it. The most important aspect that I can see of RoHS Compliance, is that the gear must be built without any lead whatsoever.

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Kingston is one of the oldest names in the PC world, and they are the largest manufacturer of system memory purchased by third party buyers. I remember hearing of Kingston in the late 1980s, a time when most PCs only had a megabyte or two of system memory, and I used their memory in my first RAM upgrade about a decade later. Recently I reviewed the Kingston HyperX PC3-11000 2 gig kit. Kingston considers it an entry-level enthusiast DDR3 HyperX kit. Today I will be looking at the PC3-13000 HyperX 2 gig kit, which at present, is considered the sweet spot of DDR3 memory by some. Will the HyperX PC3-13000 impress us more than the HyperX PC3-11000 did? Read on to see.

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The latest company to come to the 9600GT parade is MSI, and like most other cards we've looked at they've decided to move away from the stock cooler and use their own design. They also figure if they're going to do that, they may as well bump up the speed of the card and see what it's capable of. I feel like we've looked at so many 9600GT cards in such a short period of time that there isn't all that much to say here. The 9600GT has quickly become a popular little offering thanks to its performance not being like that of normal x600GT offerings from NVIDIA in the past.

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How do you define the ultimate gaming system? Is it the best price/performance system or just the system with the most power, regardless of the cost? Intel's answer goes by the name of SkullTrail, which gives you the opportunity of using two high-end processors and two high-end video cards in one system. Today we'll take a look at what Intel is offering in terms of performance compared to a regular high-end system.

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Last month we had measured Ubuntu's boot performance via the open-source Bootchart utility and had done this on all Ubuntu releases between Ubuntu 6.06 LTS and the latest development build at the time for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. From this testing we had found the boot time to decrease with each official release and the maximum disk throughput increasing. With Fedora 9 Sulphur due out next month, we have done this same boot performance testing on the Fedora side with Core 4, Core 5, Core 6, 7, 8, and 9 Rawhide.

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Quote: The AMD 780G chipset is the first new chipset that was designed by AMD after the AMD/ATI merger and it performs like a winner. Usually when a company designs a chipset with integrated graphics they just take half of a desktop GPU and stick it inside the chipset, but the 780G is the first chipset generation to have the whole graphics engine inside. The Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard is a great example of what the 780G chipset can do when properly used. The board didn't leave us with any bad to say as it was found to be stable with a BIOS that could easily worked with...

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Today NVIDIA launches their GeForce 9800 GX2 dual GPU card. It comes with two G92 GPUs and uses a new cooling design where a single cooler sits in the middle and cools both GPUs. We have the card from Zotac on our testbench today which follows the reference design specification. Unlike many other publications all our testing was conducted in Windows XP because we think that's what the majority of users still plays on.

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A new desktop chipset complete with a DDR3-based memory controller is here, along with a dual-GPU powered monolith of a graphics card that is NVIDIA's most powerful to date. Together, the combination of a GeForce 9800 GX2 (or two GX2s) with the nForce 790i SLI Ultra chipset redefine the high-end of desktop PC gaming hardware.

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It's been nearly two years since NVIDIA has produced a dual PCB video card design and they feel they have a winner in the works with the GeForce 9 series. One of the reasons NVIDIA feels so strongly about the GeForce 9800 GX2 is because they have a whole new approach at how the video game frames are being rendered. The first generation Quad SLI technology seen on the GeForce 7950 GX2 back in 2006, used a hybrid mode of split frame rendering (SFR) and alternate frame rendering (AFR) to enable concurrent rendering on four GPUs. With the latest games utilizing complex shaders, inter-frame effects, and multi-pass rendering, SFR becomes less efficient...

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Well today NVIDIA and its board partners are introducing NVIDIA's new high-end GPU the 9800GX2. We should actually just call this NVIDIA's new card since like AMD/ATI's 3870X2 this is a card using 2 GPU's. NVIDIA has been down this road before with the 7950GX2 of 2 years ago.

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For most folks, the name Rosewill means peripherals. Whether you are looking for enclosures, switches, keyboards, KVM devices or external enclosures, Rosewill likely has something that fits the bill. They are also generally known for offering a product for a reasonable price, something that isn't always a common practice in today's marketplace. On the table this time around is one of their newer external hard drive enclosures, the RX81-MP-SC; this is an enclosure designed to fit SATA hard drives in an easy to use manner. With SATA drives becoming the standard, IDE devices are getting to a point where they are no longer needed, but an external SATA enclosure can be a true friend for those looking for a means to back up important data.

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The last time we had looked at a Tagan power supply was last October when exploring the Tagan ITZ 1300W and comparing it to Thermaltake's ToughPower 1200W power supply. While most enthusiasts don't need power supplies in excess of 1,000 Watts, for those that do the ITZ 1300W did perform admirably but its voltage rails did fluctuate some, though it did have the WOW factor on its side thanks to the stunning paint job. Since then Tagan released a new power supply, which has a maximum power output of 900W, boasts six +12V rails, and is modular with LED indicators for each cable. This new power supply is the Tagan BZ 900W, and today we are reviewing it at Phoronix.

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MSI 8800 GT That we review today belongs to the most popular group of slightly overclocked 8800 GT cards. The RADEON HD 3650, in its turn, is basically a RADEON HD 2600 made using a finer process technology. Its clock rates are lower than, but close to those of 2600 XT.

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Cooler Master's Cosmos case made waves last year because of its incredibly silent design, awesome size, and excellent accoutrements. This year, Cooler Master altered the Cosmos design and released a new model: the Cosmos S. Whereas the Cosmos case was a silent beast, the Cosmos S is designed to keep things inside as cold as possible, sacrificing silence for performance. After salivating upon seeing this case in Cooler Master's booth at CES, we had to get our hands on it. ThinkComputers blasts off to explore the unknown regions of this expansive case.

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The Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme CPU cooler is very popular among enthusiast circles as the reigning champion of CPU coolers and most people will quickly recommend a TRUE to someone asking. So today I've got the TRUE for review, and I've put it to the test using both C2D and C2Q processors, is it all that? Well you'll have to read on to find out...

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Sleek-Audio SA6 is the name of a brand new pair of earphones with customizable performance. The earphones feature both a treble and bass tuning system that allows the user to alter the audio performance according to their needs and preferences. This is not done via electronics as one might expect, but by physically replacing parts of the earphone.

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Last month right before FOSDEM 2008, the 3D programming documentation for the R500 GPUs (Radeon X1000) series was released. This documentation consisted of a register reference guide for the R500 GPUs as well as a programming guide covering such areas as the command processor, vertex shaders, and fragment shaders. While the register reference guide for the R600 series is still being worked on, for those with older ATI graphics processors, AMD has went back and created a register reference guide for the R300 series.

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Last July we had looked at the Reaper HPC DDR2 memory from OCZ Technology, which not only was clocked well for its time with a memory frequency of DDR2-1066MHz, supported NVIDIA's EPP (Enhanced Performance Profiles), and boasted OCZ's admirable lifetime warranty with EVP (Extended Voltage Protection), but it was the first model to bring forth their next-generation patent-pending memory heatspreaders. The Reaper HPC (Heat Pipe Conduit) cooling solution is made up of normal heatspreaders attached to the ICs, but bonded to the top of that is a single copper heatpipe in a loop that passes through an aluminum fin array. We were pleased by both the cooling and memory performance with the Reaper HPC, but OCZ Technology didn't stop there in their quest to deliver 110% customer satisfaction. OCZ has taken their Reaper HPC design to the next level by strapping on two copper heatpipes, ensuring that each memory IC is in direct contact with one of these thermo-conductive pipes, and greatly increasing the size of the aluminum fin array. This newest memory cooling solution is known as ReaperX HPC and can be found on the PC2-6400 ReaperX HPC EB 4GB dual channel kit, which we are reviewing today.

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Aerocool is widely known for introducing the world to extra large case fans. I am sure you are familiar with the ExtremEngine case. If you don't know it by name, maybe by description - it was one of the first to have a 25cm cooling fan on the side and 14cm at the front as an intake. Well, putting the ExtremEngine to the side, Aerocool is introducing the HorsePower line of PSUs. This power supply comes in two models, 720 watts for the modest PC builder and 1020 watt model for the extremist. When you consider that Crossfire using two 3870X2 cards can be done on a high performance 620Watt PSU you can see how much further Aerocool is trying to push things. Each unit divides the power between four different rails and boasts an Aerocool trademark a large fan. A 140mm one with blue lights.

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Petite- check!, Stylish- check! Beautiful- check! No, Im not going through my list of specifications for what you might be thinking. Let me make it more obvious- full featured- check!, speedy- check! What I am looking at is the new ultra-mobile from ASUS modeled as the U6S. I received this little wonder from ASUS a couple of weeks back and it came packaged nicely in a box with CDs full or applications, drivers and user guides as well as the power adapter and two batteries.