Wed Reviews

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It has been a very long time since a graphics card has passed by the review bench of ASE Labs. Sapphire steps up to the plate with their release of the Radeon HD3870 Toxic Edition that hopes to earn some of your hard earned cash. With AMD's support of open source, the ATI partners are in a good position to conqueror the Linux market and the future to bright. Sapphire is the biggest producer of ATI cards and we will see how their product performs.

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ASE Labs has always explained the benefits of having redundant storage and backups. There are series of articles devoted to each technology. Sans Digital is a big player in RAID enclosures and their latest model, the MobileSTOR MS2UTN+ delivers USB2 and eSATA support to a 2 disk array of your choosing. This combines the best of both world for data backup and redundancy. It really is an excellent product.

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OCZ may be best known for their memory products such as low latency and high speed RAM, but they also provide other products with enhanced speed and performance. Their line of cooling products as well as flash memory provide excellent performance in today's market. Today, ASE Labs has the OCZ Rally2 Turbo 4GB USB flash drive for review. Even flash can be dual channel.

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It has been a long time since I last reviewed a Logitech product. CES has come and gone and with the show brought some interesting items. One such item that Logitech was showing was the diNovo Mini which is targeted to media center PCs like those provided by MythTV. The diNovo Mini was released a few weeks ago and it is the spotlight in this review.

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S3 hasn't stopped releasing graphics cards, but we just don't seem to hear much about them anymore. Hopefully that's going to change with the release of the Chrome 430 GT. It's a low-end card that seems to be capable of taking on the big boys at NVIDIA and AMD. Trying to fire up GPU-Z just resulted in an error due to none of it being able to be recognized, though the core comes in at 625MHz and there is 256MB of GDDR2 memory running at a speed of 500MHz DDR. We have a 64-bit interface, 64nm core, PCI Express 2.0 support, Direct X 10.1 and Open GL 2.1 support.

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Gaming mice provide many features that are unavailable in standard mice. These options include higher DPI, the inclusion of counterweights, Teflon feet and precise tracking speeds. The two biggest names in the Gaming Mice arena include Logitech and Razer. Well, move over boys, there is a new contender. Hades Gaming has released the H1 Optical Gaming Mouse and this mouse holds it own against the big boys.

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The Silverstone Treasure TS01B is a very unique 2.5 SATA hard drive enclosure. You may not only use it as a plain USB 2.0 powered unit, but may also set it up to safely encrypt your hard drive as well. The two included RFID tags then act as keys to gain access to your data.

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While renaming products to GeForce 9xxx, NVIDIA launched another graphics card based on G92 -- GeForce 9800 GTX. It's the most powerful single-GPU graphics card, designed to replace GeForce 8800 GTX (and probably GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB in the nearest future). However, at this moment GeForce 9800 GTX stands in between GeForce 9800 GX2 and GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB.

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In today's gamer-friendly market there seems to be no shortage of gaming peripherals to choose from. Unfortunately for the games, however, not all peripherals are created equal - making it difficult and risky to choose. Today I hope to help with your decision by taking a look at the Wolfking Warrior XXtreme gaming keyboard. As an avid gamer that has always used a basic keyboard, the comparison will prove to be a great test for the latest Wolfking.

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I always enjoy being surprised by a product and the M-Play Blast was one such device. Not only did it exceed my expectations, it thoroughly impressed me. If you are looking for a remote setup for your media center and want something that looks at home with your VCR and other entertainment systems then the retro look of the M-play Blast should be right up your alley.

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As flash memory prices keep lowering, we see higher capacity drives more readily available. We've already looked at the 32GB version of Corsair's Voyager drive. Today, we look at the 32GB of the Survivor. In case you missed our first article on Survivor, we would quickly like to say that its enclosure is one tough shell.

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In a few short years, OCZ has really made its mark in the PC enthusiast world. They have branched out into power supplies, CPU coolers, thermal compound, peripherals, flash media, they even have a new phase-change cooler for those extreme overclockers that need sub-zero temps. But, OCZ's forte is still high-performance system memory. Today I will be looking at OCZ's latest offering in the ReaperX series, the ReaperX PC3-1066 (DDR3-1333) 2 gig kit. Will the DDR3 ReaperX prove to be the awesome overclocker that its DDR2 little brother is? Read on and see...

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Enter the Tempest, an enclosure that claims to be the Airflow King. This is a mighty tall order to fill considering some of the similar products on the market, so we will take a closer look and see if they can live up to this statement. It will take more than just a couple of extra fans to step up to a statement like this, so we will look at overall design, active fans that come in the standard configuration as well as cooling a high-end rig. Can NZXT manage to really be considered an Airflow King?

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The gargantuan Archos 705 WiFi's attention-grabbing features include a 7-inch touchscreen, 160GB hard drive, integrated WiFi and digital video recorder functionality. What's more, because of its size, the device often gets compared to an ultra-portable PC, only minus the productivity features and processing speed that would make it truly deserve such categorization. But remember: Archos's goal - emblazoned on the front of the metal casing - was to make a large-screen mobile DVR for traveling video junkies. Extras like WiFi are meant more to provide greater access to content than to enable the 705 as a laptop replacement, and because it has less lofty ambitions than Cowon's overburdened Q5W, the gizmo achieves its goals fairly well. We just wish Archos had aimed a little higher with the most important feature of all: Audiovisual quality.

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Quote: We compared the nForce 780a SLI to the AMD 780G since we wanted to test out the integrated graphics and PureVideo HD functionality as well as general performance. It seems to have paid off; the test results were interesting as the HD DVD playback testing over the HDMI output showed that NVIDIA passed up ATI when it comes to offloading the CPU usage. NVIDIA claims that an HT3-based Phenom CPU is required to provide the necessary bandwidth when playing HD video using the motherboard GPU. Our testing showed this is not true, but NVIDIA claims moving from a HT1 processor to HT3 will give the integrated graphics the bandwidth it needs to better render HD content. This is something we will check out later, because if we are impressed with what a 2.5GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core CPU can do with HT1, we'd better be sitting down for some Phenom 50-series action...

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Quote: As the Media Center or Home Theatre PC becomes more popular in homes the need for a better way to interact with the PC on the other end becomes critical. While the standard remote control may be good for most functions, what do you do when you have the need to input information or data, or type in searches? Logitech has created the diNovo Mini which is essentially a tiny bluetooth keyboard which allows you much greater freedom with your HTPC. The diNovo Mini combines all the functionality of a touchpad, keyboard, and hotkeys all into one tiny palmtop package that even has back lighting. Check out our review of this cool accessory.

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From a technical point of view we understand that Auzentech has fully licensed Creative Labs' X-Fi chip onto their own proprietary circuit board design. So what does that mean? Well it means arguably the world's fastest and most advanced audio processing at the average consumers reach right now, with upcoming driver support for Dolby Live, DTS interactive and since we have a Creative chip, the very latest in EAX surround technology. My first impressions were good with a very noticeable notch up from the low-end after swapping from the Xonar. Not only did the low-end sound a lot beefier, it had a lot more character to it; more warmth and depth.

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Are you in the market for a small form factor m-ATX motherboard that can give you blistering performance for your multimedia needs, plus the ability to play the latest Direct X 10 games? And as a bonus you can install a second card to gain CrossFireX for your games. Then you have to check out the Sapphire PURE Hybrid CrossFire 780G Innovation Motherboard.

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The OCZ ReaperX HPC memory series is the newest variant of the heatpipe cooled memory available from the manufacturer. Its new design improves on the cooling with dual heatpipes and finer fins to keep the parts cool. In our testing we saw excellent performance going all the way to DDR2-736 at 3-3-3-12.

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Vantec has added another member to the NexStar 360 lineup. The 3i boasts some things that we have not seen from Vantec in their many ages in the industry. In the past year or so we have seen motherboards feature energy efficiency, now we have it in hard drive enclosures. The 3i has an integrated controller that can regulate power to the drive resulting in less power consumption, less noise and longer drive life. Adding the real reason why we buy hard drive enclosures, which is for data storage, the new Vantec housing may be worth taking a look at.

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A little while ago, ThinkComputers reviewed the Zalman ZM500-HP 500W power supply unit. This time around, Zalman, maker of fine cooling products and power supplies, submitted for review a more powerful, but louder version of its line of power supply units, the ZM850-HP 850W. This 80PLUS-certified unit has lots of connectivity with its modular design, and two heatpipes and an ultra-quiet fan keep the unit virtually silent. The review is here.

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Fortunately, since the PC Enclosure market is roughly organized into three segments; entry/OEM level, mid-range and performance/enthusiast, all you need to do to begin your case search, is to figure out which segment of the market fits your systems needs and zero your search down to that particular segment. Someone looking to spend between $25.00-$75.00 on their future system's enclosure need not waste their time exploring the expensive performance/enthusiast segment of the market, and so forth. Well, if part of your criteria is that you are on a budget or a first time builder, then usually the place to start is at the entry and budget mid-range levels.

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Lian Li certainly put a lot of thought into the design of this case, = even taking the time to implement the classic separate thermal zone = design that is common to many full-tower and server cases. Can this case = wow us like the PC-A17 did, though? Continue on as we find out..

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Cooler Master's Real Power M850 power supply is one of the first power supplies that has six 12V rails. This should be enough power for all your SLI or CrossFire needs. Like many other PSUs today, the M850 comes with a high gloss reflective case and a large number of connectors.

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We saw MSI mix it up just the other week with the 9600GT by overclocking it and going down the aftermarket cooler route. Aesthetically speaking, the card really didn't do a lot for us, but as we dived deeper into the testing of the card we became pleasantly surprised by the performance the cooler offered. The latest 9600GT variant from MSI sports the same cooler along with an extra 512MB of GDDR3, giving us a grand total of 1GB. The card also carries with it the same overclock we saw on the 512MB model which should aid in getting some extra performance over stock clocked offerings.

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The GeForce 8800 GT 256MB card has been around since November 2007 and now, six months later some very interesting versions of this card are appearing on the market. The ECS N8800GT-256MX is one of these cards! It appears that ECS has placed 512MB of GDDR3 memory on the N8800GT-256MX, but only enabled 256MB of the graphics memory through the BIOS. Once a quick BIOS flash is performed on the card it turned into a GeForce 8800 GT 512MB graphics card for the price of a 256MB card!

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Bjorn3D has previously reviewed the performance difference of the stock 9800GTX versus various high-end and mainstream graphic cards: namely the 8 series cards (review). We are fortunate to receive the Foxconn GeForce 9800 GTX Extreme OC card which features clock speed of 780/1900/2360 (core/shader/memory) as opposed to the reference speed of 675/1688/2200. Today, we will put this card against other mid-range graphic cards ranging from the last generation G80 to current generation G92 cards and even the HD card from AMD.

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ASRock came on board in 2002, not long after I started building my own rigs. In those six short years, they have come up with some remarkably innovative designs for economy motherboards. Today I will be looking at the ASRock Penryn 1600SLIX3-WiFi motherboard. ASRock has taken the nVidia 680i SLI chipset, given it the capability of running the new Core 2 Extreme 1600mHz FSB processors, added WiFi, and placed that in an economy-minded board.

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X48 has certainly earned a name for itself now. While Intel has been at the back end of adapting new technologies that actually work (forget the Rambus incident), the X38/X48 chipsets are somewhat ahead of their time. What can be said for the DFI X48 LANParty board other than yet another success from this once OEM company is that DFI has really taken on a new persona over the last three years. With a huge boost in R&D, DFI are designing boards that are not only functional, but look just as good as they perform.

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The Cooler Master Centurion 590 is a very affordable entry level case that brings a lot of features from much more expensive enthusiast class enclosures. Its nine 5.25 drive bays offer ultimate expandability, large video cards will also find a comfortable home in it.