At CES earlier this year, Gigabyte showed off two new motherboards that promised both a great value and of course, good overclocking abilities. The EX58-UD4P was one of those, and we’ve now been able to put it to the test. We’re happy to report that as we had hoped, the board delivers on all fronts, and coupled with a reasonable price, it looks to be well-worth a look.
Intel’s Nehalem-based Xeons are finally here, and they’ve left us gasping for air. This may well be the largest performance jump from one CPU generation to the next that we’ve ever seen. Idle power draw is way, way down, as well. The downside? We’re still looking for one.
“Gone are the dimples that were pressed into the fins in the
previous Vendetta coolers, this time the fins are plain and smooth. Rather
strangely the aluminium base around the heatpipes has 6 columns that extend
up and have three fins attached to them. I can only assume this is to give
more supporting structure to the cooler as I doubt it would make much
difference in temperatures”
The PS/2 form factor has been with us for a long, long time now. And for the most part, our power supplies have conformed to this twenty plus year old form factor, even as they grew more and more powerful. This has led to kilowatt power supplies in long, heavy cases that were hard to cool and cramped for their powerful innards.
Antec recently decided to freshen things up, and came up with a new form factor that took both interior space for circuitry and silence into account. My test subject for today is the very first example of a unit designed for this new CPX standard, the CP-850.
Currently, there are but three Antec cases on the market that can take a CPX power supply. Will this unit make us want to go and buy one of them? This is part one of my look at this new form factor… part two will see me build a system around the CP-850 inside an Antec Twelve Hundred.
While we were in Las Vegas for CES this last January we had the chance to see some of the new cases that CoolerMaster planned to release to US audience later in 2009. One of the case we saw and thought would be very appealing to the HTPC crowd is the CoolerMaster Sileo 500 case, one of the major selling points for this case is the fact that it is lined with sound deadening material on the top side-panels and bottom of the case. In other words it will keep all of your mounted components operating in a very quiet surrounding.
Genius, a brand division of KYE Systems Corp., has announced a new headphone designed to block outside sound for entertainment fans who are interested in what is playing rather than hearing extraneous sound. The GHP-04NC launched today with a revolutionary sound blocking feature that cancels out background distraction noise allowing only the music to be heard. Built for comfort and long wear, the GHP-04NC is the perfect headphone for PC gamers, music lovers and movie buffs that travel or work/live in a noisy environment.
Today we review one of Sapphire’s new products and their first PSU, the FirePSU 625W unit. The company claims that the PSU is optimized for workstations and it boasts some very good features and specifications, but is it good enough to compete against the many renowned companies in today’s PSUs market?
“Overall, at this price point, the Element S definitely gives users
something to think. Users will have to weigh the pros and cons in this case
because we also cant make up our minds completely about this case. If
you like an extremely clean-looking case on your desk and can forgo some
basic cable management and noise reduction options, the Element S certainly
should be on your short list for your next gaming rig.”
The N0204 miniNAS - the worlds smallest fully-featured NAS device. Measuring a tiny 132 x 88 x 63 mm exterior, one could easily mistake the N0204 as a regular external hard drive. But look closer and you will see a very capable two-bay NAS device that fits right in the palm of your hand. The N0204 houses two 2.5 SATA hard disks, providing up to 1TB of storage. You can manage this storage with your choice of RAID 0, 1, and JBOD, making the N0204 the most robust pocketable storage device in existence. And because its drive bays are hot-swappable and feature auto-rebuild, you can change a hard disk without powering down the unit. The N0204 even comes with Thecus® Nsync for remote replication as well as the Thecus® Backup Utility for total data security. With huge storage, RAID functionality, and advanced data safeguards packed into a tiny device, the N0204 is in a class all its own.
It’s been since the holidays that we’ve done a GPU buyers guide. It never seems like the right time to do a new GPU buyers guide, as NVIDIA and AMD have been pushing aggressively back and forth for leadership in the market place. When new parts or tweaked cards haven’t been coming out, prices have been adjusted quickly to maintain tight competition….
