Wed Reviews

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My first orb was the Thermaltake Golden Orb way back when the Abit BP6 was the thing to have. Imagine having to shave a bit of a heatsink off to have it fit on your motherboard. Those were the days when you had to work hard for every once of performance. These days, you can squeeze so much out of new CPUs. Thermaltake has released a brand new orb, the DuOrb. It combines heatpipes and two huge orb coolers.

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Thermaltake makes an entire range of PC supplies including cases, cooling, hardware and much more. The last Thermaltake product I reviewed was the excellent Armor full tower case. Thermaltake is known for making great cases and the M9 looks like a mid tower case with ventilation as its prime agenda. Should the Antec Nine Hundred be worried? Perhaps...

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Antec steps up to the plate to deliver a brand new case in the "Hundred" series. Betting on the success of the excellent Nine Hundred, Antec has released a lower end model dubbed, the Three Hundred. Known as the " Versatile Case," will the new case stand out from its bigger, badder brother? Probably not, but it is at a better price point that its sibling.

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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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The Altair A380 is an affordable slim HTPC case, with a very clean look coupled with a very durable construction. The included power supply is 80 Plus certified and can easily power today's mATX boards with multi core CPUs. Also included is an infrared remote control which is compatible with Windows Vista.

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The Intel P45 boards will sport a die shrink of the onboard components to 65nm as opposed to the previous 90nm standard. This die shrink would lead us to expect less power consumption as well as improved power efficiency. The P45 also offers official support for PCIe 2.0 with more adaptable lanes to help better support the use of multiple GPUs based on the CrossFire architecture. The P45 based boards will feature the new ICH10 series southbridge, which is extremely close in its feature set to its ICH9 brethren, but the primary difference between the two is the ICH10 series has removed LPT and legacy PATA support entirely. While not officially offering support for the new 1600 MHz FSB processors we have it on good authority that most of the P45 boards will support these chips.

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ZEROtherm has really made a name for themselves over the past year. The last 3 products we reviewed from them scored very high and all of them have received awards. But there are still people who have not heard of them. Well ZEROtherm has announced a new cooler, the ZEN FZ 120, which they were kind enough to send us. Will it perform up to what we have grown to expect from ZEROtherm? Read on to find out...

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The 80GB Zune has undeniable cool factor, given its big screen and built-in WiFi. But rather than trumping the competition, it falls in that gray area between the somewhat ho-hum iPod Classic and the rip-roaring iPod Touch. We applaud Microsoft for trying to make the hardware and software as un-Microsoft (read: user-friendly) as possible, but even this second-gen model has some kinks that need working out. And although we love the wireless sync and recently upgraded song-sharing features, we hope future generations will include more practical WiFi features like a Web browser.

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The T-Power N750 comes loaded with features and accessories. BIOS options leave nothing to be desired by even the most adventurous overclocker, giving a solid platform for AMD fans. I love the package of accessories and software included and NVIDIA finally brings PCI Express 2.0 support to SLI configs for AMD CPUs. While onboard video is less than stellar, adding a high end video card will allow for some energy savings.

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While the RadeonHD developers have been busy working on Radeon HD 3200 / 780 Series support and other features for this open-source ATI R500/600+ driver, the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support has been lagging behind. Earlier this month Matthias Hopf was successful in getting DRM working on an RS690 GPU and he has published RadeonHD DRM code into his personal development tree, but no code has yet to reach master. Meanwhile, as the xf86-video-ati driver is using AtomBIOS, they are able to spend more time working on the 3D features and other areas and less time banging on registers or even waiting on register documentation to arrive. David Airlie has been working on the R500 3D support along with Alex Deucher and Corbin Simpson. The trio has been making some great headway towards open-source 3D goodness for Radeon X1000 and HD 2000/3000 GPUs. Their most recent efforts have focused around the R500 fragment program code and today they have reached a monumental milestone.

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With more and more emphasis being put on the cooling proficiency and the quietness of cooling products, many people are beginning to look try different ways to keeping their PC chilled at a reasonable noise level. One of the most popular methods is to purchase a passive cooler, I.E. one without a fan. But can these fanless coolers really live up to their fan-covered ancestors? That's the question that begs to be answered, so Coolermaster have sent me the Z600 to check out.

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The Hypersonic Avenger AG2 notebook was just launched on May 22nd, 2008, but that doesn't mean we haven't had a sample for well over a month now. The Hypersonic Avenger AG2 notebook is the same thing as the Clevo M72R notebook, so Hypersonic was able to get a production sample in our hands before they officially started to carry this recently released 12.1 notebook. This gave us the chance to do a long term test drive, which is something we rarely get to do in the fast paced computer industry. For the past month we have used the Hypersonic Avenger AG2 as our traveling notebook...

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MSI held its ECOlution press conference in Taipei this afternoon and it was quite an upbeat event with fancy green dancers, attended by a sizeable audience of local Taiwanese press. It seems a tad strange for MSI to hold a press event of this size just one week before the Computex trade show begins in Taipei but there was plenty for us to see early before the show begins. In the following posts we will show you plenty of shots of the WIND notebook and WIND PC along with a bunch of other goodies which focus on power saving and monitoring.

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Quote: The Aeneon XTune 2GB DDR3-1600 dual channel memory kit wound up surprising me. While I didn't expect it to perform poorly, I did not anticipate that it would keep up with similar kits with tighter timings. Despite being rated for 1600MHz at 9-9-9-28 timings, it managed to perform on par with other kits with timings of 8-8-8-34 and 7-7-7-18.

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Today marks our first look at the heatpipe tower design. This design isn't relatively new to the industry but is different from what we have become used to here at ModSynergy. Regular coolers have a fan that blows downward on the heatpipe, and hot air can escape anywhere it wants to. But with tower style coolers, the heatpipes are raised vertically and the hot air is exhausted through the left side of the case. This idea seems like a much more efficient design because the hot air is being directed to where your rear exhaust fan lies. Read on to see if this indeed makes a difference. Today also marks our first review of a ZEROtherm product. ZEROtherm has recently released the new ZEN FZ120 CPU cooler and we are happy to provide you an in-depth look at what you can expect having tested this heatsink in our new workbench consisting of the Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 spitting out easily 100W of juice. We'll see if this heatsink can cool down or crashes and burns. Oh yeah, overclocked results @ 3.0GHz are included (spitting out well over 100 watts of heat) so read on to see how the ZEN FZ120 performs.

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The X300 notebook has an Intel Core Duo SL7100 (1.2GHz, 4MB L2, 800MHz FSB) CPU. The monitor is a 13.3 WXGA+ TFT (LED backlight). There is a 3x3 UltraConnect II which is a connectivity suite offering wireless LAN, UWB (UltraWide Band), Bluetooth and numerous wireless WAN choices including a system that utilizes native GPS functionality that is built into the X300. The hard drive is unique in that it is a solid state drive (SSD) 64GB in size. What this means is that the hard drive is not a rotating disk in the traditional sense, but rather comprises of several chips with addressable memory arrayed in a specific format to prolong the usability of the SSD drive.

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NZXT has recently been coming out with some great mid tower cases. ThinkComputers got the chance to take a look at the new NZXT Tempest case. This case is probably different than most other cases you've seen because it has a bottom, rather than top, mounted PSU. It also includes plenty of features for overclockers, water coolers, and storage fanatics, while still displaying a sleek design. NZXT calls this the Airflow King because it includes SIX 120mm and larger fans. Don't worry, they're probably quieter than the case you have right now.

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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 Thermaltake Armor+ MX Case offer lots of great features. One bug plus with this case is air circulation. With two 120mm fans as well as a massive 23cm fan on the left side panel it provides tremendous airflow. This will keep the computer components inside the case cool in any environment. This case also has a tooless design for installation of drives in the drive bays and cards in the expansion slots. Watch the video to find out more.

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It has been over a year since ATI got into the Folding@home project and it seems that the time is right for NVIDIA to join in! Mr. Vijay Pande himself was in San Jose today and we managed to catch up with him while he was giving the presentation on behalf of Stanford University on how folding is going to work on NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards. This is a must read if you are interested in distributed computing.

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Intel has thrown a new chipset into the fray to replace one of its aging components. P45 is set to be the new mainstream chipset from Intel to replace its aging P35 chipset by bringing some new features and support to the table. For our initial tests, we have been handed two GIGABYTE motherboards based around this chipset, one at the top end of the spectrum and one for the mainstream marketplace. Today we test the Intel P45 Express based GIGABYTE EP45-DQ6 and EP45-DS3R.

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If you are like me, and have been happy with mid-range cards, spend a few hours at your favorite game played at the highest settings, using AA, and higher resolutions while using an upper end card, and you'll probably realize that you've been in denial for all of this time. Today I will be looking at the Asus EN9800GTX Top, a factory overclocked version of nVidia's latest top-of-the-line single-GPU video card, with 512mb of DDR3 memory. Will this video card finally make me realize that rather than being practical when buying mid-range cards, I've just been cheap? Read on and see!

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Recently ATI refreshed their line up of video cards, and they were nice enough to send one over for review, the ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT. Added to this new card were HD AC3 audio, 1080P video output, DX10 support for Vista, and a few other suprises. The testing and review took awhile, but I wanted to make sure things were done right.

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Sony has a winner with its MDR-AS50G sport headphones: They're lightweight, they fit securely, and they sound good indoors and outside. Their in-ear design is definitely geared towards fitness nuts rather than commuters; they don't block out a whole lot of sound, which could be a plus or a minus depending on where you work out. The low price ($49.99 USD) is a big plus, since we tend to burn through exercise headphones faster than we burn through calories.