Wed Reviews

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I've always been keen to recommend Crucial in the past when people wanted RAM with a lifetime warranty that works as expected. Not until a few years ago did Crucial start offering their Ballistix overclocking RAM. Fast forward to the new DDR3 days of today and we find a new Ballistix PC3-16000 kit that offers speeds of 2000MHz! You'll be pressed to find a board that can even handle this speed, I know I didn't have one.

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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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The USB 2.0 4 Port KVM Auto Switch is an economical option for those who in need of a KVM that can handle a more expansive computing setup. Let's check out this product and see if it is the solution for ones multi-computing needs...

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Quote: The Osiris turned out to be one beautiful case. Hiper has really made an excellent product, with great attention to detail. It appears refined and polished, and in no way comes off as gaudy. No matter what side you look to you will find it blends perfectly with the rest. If you are looking for a clean, easy to work with, extremely well made mid-tower case, you should definitely consider the Osiris.

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The Sugo SG02-F is described as their most affordable case yet and it offers an improved layout over the original SG01. Unlike the revolutionary differences between the SG01 and SG03, the SG02-F is just an evolution of the SG01 design with expanded support for graphics cards and is composed of a steel body. Thanks to these design improvements, this SFF case is capable of handling long graphics cards such as the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 and GeForce 8800 Ultra. The SG02-F is quite similar to the original SG02 except for turning from aluminum to steel construction and some other enhancements. With a price tag under $80 USD, does this case still deliver on the features and exceptional build quality we have become to know and love from this high-end manufacturer or have they cut too many corners to achieve this pricing?

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NVIDIA usually pleases the enthusiast community with their product launches, and no launch has been more memorable lately than the GeForce 8800 GTX and GTS graphic card launch more than eighteen months ago. So when the 9800 GTX product line launched on April 1st, 2008 there was a lot of commotion surrounding the new crown prince. With such a successful debut of the 8800 GTX back in 2006, the level of enthusiast skepticism surrounding the new 9800 GTX was unquestionably high. First came the lower mid-level 9600 GT, and then the ultra-high level GeForce 9800 GX2 which utilized two G92 GPU cores. Yet title of fastest single-GPU video card remains the honor of NVIDIA's GeForce 9800 GTX. Benchmark Reviews has already helped launch this product, and now we're back to test the performance of Foxconn's new GeForce 9800 GTX Standard OC Edition 512MB video card 9800GTX-512N.

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I honestly thought that we were running out of letters to use for overclocked 9600GT cards. BFG pretty much has OC and OC2 locked down, Zotac has AMP!, ASUS has TOP and XFX has become tired of just using XXX, now opting for words like Alpha Dog. TwinTech has opted for XXT for its top overclocked 9600GT. It's been ages since we've seen anything from TwinTech, but the last time we looked we were pretty impressed with what they offered.

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* Lenovo tests the waters in the LCD market with a product that we've been waiting quite some time for -- a 22 LCD monitor that offers a 1920 x 1200 native resolution. But is its resolution alone enough reason for you to give the nod to the L220X, or is it worth waiting for other manufacturers to follow?

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Occasionally here at OCIA.net we receive review requests from overseas = companies that we've never heard of before. Such was the case with = computer and home electronics manufacturer NorthQ. Based in Denmark, = NorthQ offers chassis, cooling and power supply products as well as = other electronics for home and car. Today I will be taking a look at = their Siberian Tiger water cooling system for AMD and Intel processors.

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To demonstrate the raw power of Nehalem, Intel first started encoding raw HD footage into 1080p Blu-ray format and while we didn't get any numbers, it handled it without a sweat at all and was on track to complete in record time with solid CPU utilization over all eight threads. Next up we got a look at a program called Deep Viewer which brings a new way at how we could be looing at old photos in the not so distance future. Intel had a monitor setup with touch capabilities and were showing off how Nehalem handled accessing and processing huge amounts of data in terms of photos and mapping in real-time.

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Under the heatsink is a whole lot of GDDR3, which in itself doesn't mean much--you can find a pile of budget cards with a gig of RAM, the extra memory incapable of boosting their meager performance--but the 3870 is plainly able to fill its frame buffer. If it were truly a budget card, it would come off as sheer marketing; with a high-end card like this, it really does make a difference. The last great ATI card was the HD 2900 XT, a spectacular misfire. But despite it's ridiculous power consumption, sub-par video processing, and tremendous heat with the blower to match, it still beat out the 512MB HD 3870. I hoped that this redesigned 3870 would have what it takes to finally put out the year-old performance despot. And it does, in almost every way.

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At this test station these two individuals were individually testing Nano processors at various speeds and temperatures to see if they pass stress testing. If you are curious what Centuar was testing you are in luck. Centaur was checking to see if the VIA Nano CPU's were stable at 1.8GHz at three different temperatures (85C, 5C and then 25C)with 1.1V on production platforms. The processors that pass testing at this stage move along to become VIA Nano L2100 processors, which are the 1.8GHz processors. I was able to see VIA Nano processors get speed binned right in front my eyes...

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How can you not love the 9600GT? It's everywhere. It seems that every company is making at least five different versions of the card; stock clocked, overclocked, 512MB, 1GB, active cooling, passive cooling, dual slot, single slot, HDMI, Display Port, DVI and so much more. It is the card that caters to everyone. GIGABYTE is here today with the heat-pipe version that carries with it 512MB of memory. Silent cards are extremely important to some people, but it was generally limited to low-end models in the past.

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The Samsung HT-X810 was one of the coolest soundbars announced at CES 2008, mostly because of the 5.8GHz wireless subwoofer. That plus Bluetooth connectivity, a USB port, HDMI output, and an on-board DVD/CD player put it ahead of most competitors, and the glossy black styling matches Samsung's HDTV line (especially our 40-incher) perfectly. At nearly $700, it isn't an entry-level product, but it's a lean, mean home theater system that can eliminate a lot of the clutter of more traditional setups.

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If you live in the US, you have probably seen TV commercials about the analog TV signal being switched off in February of 2009. For old home TV sets, there is a converter that can be purchase and the government is even stepping in to help subsidize some of the expenses for the converter. However, for thoes users who mainly use their computer to watch TV via a TV tuner, they may be out of luck unless they upgrade their old TV tuner to a new one that supports digital signals.

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So why not just get two 3870s and rub a little CrossFire into your box? There are two reasons, really. For most people, that's just not an option. Dual-PCI-Express can easily tag a Benjamin onto the price of a motherboard, and, in Micro-ATX land, it's a mythical beast that visits overclockers in their dreams. And there's another thing: regular 3870s get the lower-binned GPUs--the faster-clocking chips go into the X2s. But, lastly, the 3870 promises something else: tri- and quad-CrossFireX. But that begs the initial question: now that the release is behind us, how much awesome stuck to the HD 3870 X2, and how much washed away?

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Up on the review block today is the Super Talent T800UX2GC4 DDR2 PC2-6400 800Mhz 2x1Gb Ram, I'm sure most people are familiar with Super Talent, they makes quite a few products related to memory like USB Drive, SSD Drives and of course regular memory. The ram I have today from them is very sleek looking with it's dark blue heatspreaders, but looks don't mean much if it doesn't perform, so let's just jump right on in and see just how well it does perform...

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Honeywell is not a name you think of when you think of LCD Monitors, actually they are very new into the market. Recently they partnered with Soyo to produce LCD monitors and televisions. We got a chance to take a look at one of their latest LCD's the very affordable Topaz S 24-inch LCD monitor. Now Honeywell has a new LCD that is a more advanced and premium version of the Topaz S. Let's take a look at the Arius 22-inch Widescreen LCD Monitor!

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While most early adopters and Gen Y-ers are used to the idea of watching TV on their PC using services like Bebo, Hulu, Joost or a million alternatives, now the rest of the world is finally catching up. Have yet to join the party? It's about time you tuned in - and upgraded your monitor to really enjoy all of these groovy options as they're meant to be experienced. Thankfully, Dell's new Ultra-Sharp 2408WFP 24-inch widescreen flat panel monitor can help.

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Quote: The comfort level of the Discovery 925 is incredibly nice. After finding the right size to wear, you start to wonder why manufacturers haven't come up with a similar design yet. A friend of mine who has small ears and has always had problems wearing in-the-ear type of headsets was able to fit the Discovery 925 with no problems at all. It doesn't matter if you are left-ear or a right-ear Bluetooth wearer, you can switch between ears with ease. Some headsets like the Jawbone require you to physically change the hardware for this basic switch. After using the 925 for a few days, there is no way I want to go back to the ancient fit of an ear hook like the Jawbone or deep in the ear canal of the Gennum. These headsets are great performers, but their fit is not as comfortable, free and versatile as the 925...

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Quote: The FZ120 Zen does what I believe ZEROtherm wanted it to do, and it does a great job. It has performance very close to that of the Nirvana, is quieter than the Nirvana, and is cheaper than the Nirvana. The Zen can be found for $39 + shipping, and that's a steal. With a price like that the Zen is an inexpensive upgrade for anyone, and is almost (depending where you shop) $15-20 cheaper than its bigger brother, the Nirvana...

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Quote: The ECS A780GM-A Black Series AMD 780G motherboard wound up being quite interesting. It offers quite a few appealing features, such as a back panel full of useful connections, onboard HD audio and video with HDMI output, an integrated RAID controller, support for AMD's Hybrid CrossFire and their new Phenom processors. With such a selection of goodies onboard, the relatively low price initially seems too good to be true.

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Recently, ASUS was among the first companies to put a pair of ATI HD 3850s on a single graphics card, for a more affordable dual-GPU experience. I reviewed a Radeon HD 3850 (single GPU) earlier this year, and was very impressed with it.performance just shy of an 8800GT at $100 less. A pair on one card should be an awesome experience. Today I will be looking at the ASUS EAH3850 X2 1GB, twin 3850s with 512MB each, one of the few on the market. Will it meet my dual-3850 expectations? How will it compare to the 9800GTX, nVidia's top of the line single-GPU card? Read on and see!