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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
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OCZ is well known for their memory and power supplies, but we thought we'd see just how well their current fleet of CPU coolers held up. We pit the Vendetta, Vendetta 2, Vanquisher and even the old-school Vindicator against our QX6850 to see what each one is made of.
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Just as DDR2 went through a maturation process, DDR3 is finally beginning to realize its promise. And with kits from the top contenders already pushing the 2GHz barrier, those looking (and who can afford) to make the jump from DDR2 to DDR3 are taking notice. Up to this point, many scoffed at the idea of spending several hundred dollars "upgrading" to a DDR3 based system, and for good reason. DDR2 compatible motherboards based on INTEL's P35 or NVIDIA's 680i have, for the most part, served their masters well. Coupled with the retail pricing landslide that's grabbed hold of DDR2 chips in recent months, yesterday's builds have clung to life longer than many in the industry could have predicted, or hoped.
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OCZ really knows how to take advantage of the performance market. OCZ is well known for producing legendary overclocking memory, popular power supplies, performance flash memory products, and even more so for improving such products. Many years ago, the original OCZ Rally USB flash drive gained immense popularity amongst enthusiasts and consumers alike. When the OCZ Rally2 came out a couple years ago, it was even faster than its predecessor -- we've already reviewed the original first revision and were quite impressed by the speed (Although a bit less with its access latency due to UT161 controller problems). From what we can see, we are quite glad that OCZ fixed the latency issues with their flash drives in the past year or so. Recently, OCZ released another dual channel flash drive to the Rally performance flash drive family -- the OCZ Rally2 Turbo. The manufacturer claims that it can hit up to 35MB/s in read performance. How is the turbocharged dual channel Rally2 going to perform? That's something we are really interested to find out.
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Wednesday, March 19, 2008
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Rated at 5-5-5-18, the OCZ Technology PC2-8000 Platinum Edition 4GB DDR2 kit is quite impressive in terms of timings, speed, and capacity. Running at 1000MHz it was able to outperform competition in the form of DDR2 from Patriot and DDR3 from OCZ Technology. While overclocked to 1080MHz it was even able to outperform the DDR3 kit running at 1333MHz.
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Sunday, March 16, 2008
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Last July we had looked at the Reaper HPC DDR2 memory from OCZ Technology, which not only was clocked well for its time with a memory frequency of DDR2-1066MHz, supported NVIDIA's EPP (Enhanced Performance Profiles), and boasted OCZ's admirable lifetime warranty with EVP (Extended Voltage Protection), but it was the first model to bring forth their next-generation patent-pending memory heatspreaders.
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Thursday, March 13, 2008
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Long gone are the days when OCZ were merely a memory manufacturer, today they produce some decent power supplies (after their acquisition of Pc power) and have a range of cooling products available including CPU coolers and thermal compounds. Today we are taking a look at two of the most recent additions to the OCZ cooling family, the Vendetta CPU cooler and Freeze thermal compound. We will be comparing both against the excellent Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro and MX-2 paste.
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Going from 2GB to 4GB was like bringing my over-powered, under-performing system out of its shell. There were no nagging little delays jumping through menus. Switching between tasks was no longer annoying. The network latency which was new to me in Vista all but vanished. Photoshop and Excel became useable tools again and after re-configuring the scratch disks and the paging file, Photoshop was quicker than it had ever been. I now want to grab a second kit of this memory and see how much 4x2GB will speed things up. Of course, all of this is not visible in any benchmarks, as we saw today.
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Monday, March 10, 2008
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A couple of years ago memory makers started selling memory modules with aluminum heatspreaders but these days you can already buy memory modules with relatively big cooling solutions like the OCZ FlexXLC series which features barbs for liquid cooling or the Reaper HPC modules which feature a heatpipe. These cooling solutions look pretty good and may improve overclocking performance. The subject of this review is the OCZ Reaper HPC PC-9200 memory kit, this product is clocked at 1150MHz and is OCZ's fastest air-cooled DDR2 memory kit. It's available in a 2GB kit, runs at 5-5-5-18 timings with a voltage of 2.1-2.3V and features the Reaper HPC cooling design.
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Friday, March 7, 2008
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Today is finally the day when we can tell you more about the OCZ Technology Cryo-Z. The information that we have gathered is not from a press release nor an assumption based on seeing the unit at a technology show. This is in fact real hands on with the unit, sitting at the Secret Bunker of Technology. Not listed in OCZ's official documentation is the fact that the Cryo-Z was designed in part by chilli1, a HVAC/R engineer who has become known in the computer enthusiast industry for making one-off and small scale production phase change components.
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Tuesday, March 4, 2008
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There are so many thumb drives out there, some fast and some slow, some high capacity and some smaller than a quarter, that it's really easy to brush them aside and think that those differences don't really matter. OCZ wants to discourage this kind of a mentality and it shows from their diverse lineup of USB flash drives, from durable to speedy to high capacity. Today we're going to have a look at the OCZ Rally2 Turbo 8GB USB flash drive, which promises to provide impressive speeds (up to 35MB/s read) while maintaining high capacity (available in 4GB and 8GB modules).
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Tuesday, February 26, 2008
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The team at OCZ are among those manufacturers. The past couple of months have seen OCZ release several new DDR2 memory kits, this one, which is a 4 gig version of their popular PC2-8000 5-5-5 Platinum Edition. Will we get the performance from this Platinum Edition memory that we have come to expect from OCZ?
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Tuesday, February 19, 2008
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Benchmark Reviews has been hard at work trying to ride the wave of innovation into the next big technology. While Solid State Disks can now finally promise the best of both worlds (speed and capacity), they are still extremely expensive. OCZ is very well known for their drive towards high performance, yet in this article you will see a different side to them with their SSD product line. We have tested and used the new OCZ 64GB SATA Solid State Drive OCZSSD64GB, and we're ready with the results.
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Monday, February 11, 2008
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With systems with multiple video cards requiring more power everyday, 1,000 W power supplies are becoming very common. OCZ has released a new 1,000 W product in the market, ProXStream 1000 W, targeted to power-hungry consumers that are willing to put three or four high-end video cards (this unit has four six-pin VGA power connectors) and several hard disk drives inside their systems. What is really different about this power supply compared to other 1,000-watt units around is it uses a small form factor, being at the same size of any standard ATX power supply, due to its interesting internal design using two printed circuit boards stacked. We completely disassembled this new unit from OCZ to see how it looks like inside and what design and components were used, plus we put it on our load tester to see whether it can deliver its rate 1,000 W or not.
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If you are looking for a fast flash drive with lots of storage space the Rally 2 Turbo is a great choice. The drive is also thin enough that it easily fits into a crowded USB hub. OCZ promises lofty read and write speeds for the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo 4GB. The read speed is up to 35MB/s and the write speed is up to 30MB/s. In testing I used HD Tach to test the read and write speeds of the OCZ Rally 2 Turbo 4GB. I saw a read speed of 32.8 MB/s and a write speed of 29.9MB/s, both of which are within a fraction of what OCZ promises speed wise.
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Friday, February 8, 2008
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DDR3 might be slow to catch on, but the competition is fierce and the selection, huge. One of the first DDR3 kits to really catch my eye was OCZ's Titanium 2GB PC3-12800, featuring an XMP profile to offer even better settings than what are advertised. Luckily, it also has some OC'ing room to boot.
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