Today Artiom looks at the famed Western Digital 150GB 10,000RPM SATA hard drive. Can it stand up to the 1TB Samsung drive? The answers may surprise you...
Every now and then, a titan is born from the flash drive industry. With its rugged good looks, 200m water resistance, anti-shock collar, and disgustingly awesomely large storage, Jason Dumbaugh tests out the new Corsair 32GB Survivor flash drive. Check it out to see how it performs!
Is power as important as good looks? Why not have both? Today, Artiom checks out the Kingwin 700W Mach 1 Power Supply. Can this chrome stallion hold up in testing?
You are stranded in the desert, forest, or on the road and need to make a call and find that your cell phone is dead. Just after you finish cursing your god of choice you remember you have the Solio H1000, plug it in and a short while later your phone is usable once again. This is the concept behind the Solio H1000, a hybrid charger that is billed as a flexible solar charger that will restore life to lifeless cell phones and other USB charged devices. We test the Solio and bring you the fact and the fiction.
As a founding father in what's still considered a niche market, Alienware offers a range of custom notebooks and PCs, culminating with the Area-51. Built with gaming in mind, Alienware recently overhauled their flagship lineup to keep up with this ever evolving segment and sent us their Area-51 ALX, a water-cooled powerhouse sporting a quad-core processor and dual-GPUs. But it takes more than a spec sheet to impress us, and at $7K, we're expecting an out-of-this-world ride. Did Alienware oblige?
AMD and NVIDIA are now pushing towards a more power conscious chipset market with integrated features in order to boost their value. This can only mean good things for end users who not only get a more power friendly based PC (and in todays green market, this is big brownie points), but also features that weren't previously added.
Today we are testing out the mid-range value option from NVIDIA; the GeForce 7100/630i board from abit. How does it perform? Let?s push forward and begin with a look at the specifications.
Australian development studio Cyber Sport Pty. Ltd. recently purchased Flexiglow Hong Kong and its high-performance gaming accessory subsidiary Cyber Snipa. Cyber Snipa produces mice, keyboards, headsets, and webcams for gamers. The focus of this review is the Cyber Snipa Sonar 5.1 USB headset, a comfortable surround sound, bus-powered headset with a nine foot (!) cable and a fully-positionable microphone. BIOS LEVEL feels the beats and thumps in this review.
The TomTom XL S is the company's midrange GPS unit, and offers the same core functionality as the more expensive models while offering a few less features and a reduced price. It includes maps of the US and Canada, includes text-to-speech functionality for reading street names aloud, and offers a large database of Points of Interest as well. Though its functionality is primarily limited to driving directions (no music playing capability, for example), it's a highly capable and intuitive device that will serve most motorists quite well.
Albatron GeForce 9600GT-512X Video Card Review @ Legit Reviews
Big on performance and easy on the wallet, the Albatron GeForce 9600GT-512X video card offers unheard of graphics processing power at a wallet friendly price point. Finally you can enjoy decent frame rates in the latest DirectX 10 games at resolutions that gamers actually want to use. Read on as we take a look at the Albatron GeForce 9600GT-512X and how it does when we game on it and then overclock it to the max.
Quote: "The average improvement of the Albatron GeForce 9600GT-512X over the ATI Radeon HD 3850 for both the game and synthetic testing is over 40%. There is no way you can spin these results to the ATI Radeon HD 3850's favor! Looks like the Radeon HD 3850 is the Hillary Clinton of this matchup... it held up until the end, but the math is just not there to give it any victory..."
Well one thing is for certain, the OCZ PC2-8500 4GB Dual Channel Reaper HPC Memory is fully compatible with the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3P and ASUS Blitz Formula Motherboards. The memory is definitely capable of exceeding it's rated specs. Given the complexities and obstacles associated with a 4GB kit, 1066 MHz is a worthy achievement in its own right. The 4GB Reaper kit remained completely stable throughout testing as well as passed several hours of further scrutiny from our trusty RST PRO 2 provided by Ultra-X. If there were any type of weaknesses in the memory, the RST PRO 2 would have definitely found them.
From 800 MHz 4-4-4-12 to 1150 MHz 5-5-5-15, you get sweet 2 x 2GB Dual Channel memory kit built with quality ICs backed by OCZ's Lifetime Warranty. Performance is top notch with excellent results for the most avid gamer or application guru. Vista users will also appreciate the larger capacity allowing their system to stretch its legs fully without worrying about system resources. This is the largest 4GB overclocking memory kit thus far I've had the pleasure of testing and now understand its hidden benefits. I highly recommend this kit the next time your seriously considering a DDR2 upgrade.
Enermax is one of the world's most reputable switching PSU manufacturers and their products are considered to be some of the best that money can buy. Recently they released two new product lines, the Pro 82+ and Modu 82+ series. Both product ranges contain units with maximum power output ranging from 385W to 625W and whilst a maximum output of 385W may sound insufficient with the availability of 1kW+ PSUs during the past year, it is more than adequate power for a modern system with a single GPU and numerous drives installed. Today we will take a look at the Pro 82+ 385W unit which appears to be using some industry leading features and technologies despite being it the least powerful Enermax PSU we have tested.
Ever wanted a guide on hard drive performance, where you can compare the performance of a wide range of hard drives? Well, we are not quite there yet, but that is our ultimate objective.
In this performance comparison guide, we will test and compare the performance of all the hard drives we can get our hands on. This is similar to what we are doing in the Intel Core 2 Processor Performance Comparison Guide.
Here's a quote from the guide :-
"WinBench 99 2.0 has proven that it can still serve as a consistent and reliable hard drive benchmark even in Windows Vista. It has given us a lot of interesting data. If the Business and High-End simulations were not good enough, the raw transfer rate results were certainly most useful. From the transfer rate results, you can see which hard drive has a higher transfer rate, and how areal density affects that performance metric. It also shot down the perception that a newer model is always faster."
When I reviewed their luscious A5s, my own music, music that I leave playing all the time, music that I can play in my head *sans stereo*, I... it mesmerized me. There was so much I didn't know I was missing, so much that I didn't expect to be able to hear without some studio phones. I will test these smaller, "desktop" speakers against a high standard. I will test them on an Audioengine standard.
I4U NEWS reviews the XFX 9800 GX2 Black Edition Video Card.
Today we are checking out one of the fastest and coolest video cards ever to come from XFX and NVIDIA, the XFX 9800 GX2 Black Edition. The Black Edition is overclocked even more than the legendary XFX XXX cards.
There is no doubt that the XFX 9800 GX2 Black Edition is one of the best performing video cards on the market. It outperformed all the stock 9800GX2s I have tested and posted significantly better minimum frame rates on game tests. The XFX 9800 GX2 Black Edition and the Asus EN9800GX2 Top were a virtual tie performance wise. Both the cards also offer a nice game bundle. However, the XFX 9800 GX2 Black Edition edges the Asus card out in game quality and warranty.
EXCLUSIVE: VH Visits the Intel Hawthorn Farm Campus @ Virtual-Hideout
Over the last couple years, I've been attending various LANs and tech events looking for that other side we rarely get to see. InfernaLAN is just one of the many events sponsored by INTEL and wide variety of vendors and integrators including Patriot Memory, Corsair, BFG, S3 Graphics, IBuyPower, PowerPC, and Alienware.
It was here that I met many of Intel's finest incognito. These guys take their personal systems as seriously as any enthusiast, cooled with the latest DangerDen water cooled blocks and assembled in some of the sweetest cases created by man. I thought that if they are this much fun and cared enough about what they do to show off all these demo systems, then I really need to see what it is they do. Well, a couple weeks after, I received a call with an invitation to visit Intel's mysterious Hawthorn Farm Campus where much of the desktop motherboard and processor magic happens. The dates were picked, test hardware assembled, and the tour schedule set.
Chipset cooling has become a predominant factor in many people's choices when purchasing coolers, and with many CPU coolers offering impressive collateral cooling for the chipset, it seems that not much more can be done to cool the sometimes inaccessible chipset.
Enter Coolink, who have sent me the new ChipChilla to review.
From Necessity to Obsession ..... It's a Mod Thing!!!
It's A Mod Thing!! You see, modders are that rare species that can take any aspect, well of just about anything, and associate it with a mod or even make a mod out of it, or build a mod into it.
The A-DATA X-Series is available in DDR2 and DDR3 flavors. Their DDR3 1600 MHz is set at a solid CL7 and comes with graphite colored heatspreaders in a very elaborate package. If 1600 MHz is not enough, you may go for the 1900 MHz version instead.
