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Reviews Around The Web
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Monday, August 4, 2008
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NVIDIA's new GeForce 9800 GTX+ comes with a 55 nm CPU that runs at higher clock speeds, yet consumes less power than the original 65 nm chip. Zotac's Amp! Edition further increases the operating frequencies. Even though the higher clocks make the card faster than the ATI HD 4850, the difference is very small and probably not noticable while gaming.
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The Zaward Gyre looks quite interesting with the black shroud. Its unique design shows us that it is a competitor to more "known" heatsinks. Featuring a nice finish with blue LED lights, being very easy to install and having great performance, the Gyre lives up to all of its expectations.
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In Win is a king of case manufacturers. Their purview extends across the entire realm of beige, from the calm sea of beige to the shallow cliffs of beige, with the inoffensive beige plains between. I speak in jest. I have a soft spot in my heart for the oft-marginalized company, mainly because they made the first case I ever bought. It was, you know, off-white, a mini-tower affair that came with an adequate PSU. And even though I've since played with the full spectrum of cases, that first case I still have, and still use. Despite the color, it was way ahead of its time, both in layout and features. So I look at the Alpha360, boxed up in Engrish, and I think, people should know about these guys. These cases are awesome. I mean, these specific cases. The rest are all King Beige.
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One of the last cases to make a hit with the enthusiasts was the recent Antec Nine Hundred. To give you a little recap, it offered front Dual Blue LED 120mm fans along with two internal 120mm fans, a unique side window with the optional 120mm cut out behind the black screen, 200mm top exhaust fan, top mounted front panel ports, and looked pretty cool. You can still find them on several shelves and makes one heck of a mid-tower case. After patiently waiting, we received word that the Antec Twelve Hundred was finally on the way. If you liked the Nine Hundred and just about bought one, you'll really appreciate the Twelve Hundred. It's one of those cases you might just have to have.
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A lot of the time I use my computer in the late evenings when the ambient noise is very quiet in my house, so trying to keep PC noise to a minimum is important so as not to annoy me/disturb others. With testing the Noctua NF-P12+NF-B9 fans today I have been treated to a taste of really quiet computing.
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Our good friends at ASRock feel your pain. Building practical solutions for tough problems into motherboards is what they are best known for, and they have just released what may be the answer to your problems, an Intel P45 board capable of running both DDR2 and DDR3 memory. This isn't a new idea, a few companies did the same thing with the P35 last year. Most attempts were less than awesome, but ASRock's board was clearly the best attempt. With this experience under their belts, ASRock has released the P45R2000-Wifi. Will it be the solution for those wanting a gradual crossover from DDR2 to DDR3? Keep reading to see!
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At the 2008 Computex event, Intel officially took the curtains off its 4 series PCI Express chipset range which is set to replace the original 3 series of chipsets. Intel's 4 series not only brings Crossfire support to the mainstream, thanks to its ability to run two PCI Express x8 slots for GPUs, but it also adds PCI Express 2.0 to all of its 4 series of chipsets. That's right, even the low-end of the 4 series gets a new PCI Express controller hub. Today we have been sent two of the newest members of the 4 series family from ASRock, and they are loaded with features for the home user along with some nice overclocking for the enthusiast. Today we take a look at the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi and the P43R1600Twins-WiFi. How do they stack up? - Come and see with us.
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A company "built on gamers' dreams," NZXT has since expanded upon their "Crafted Series" cases, into a line of more modest, yet still stylish, "Classic Series" cases, and even two lines of power supplies. They have, for the most part, enjoyed great success with all of their products, which are known for being high quality despite having a lower than usual cost. Today we have for review the NZXT Performance Power 800W power supply, one whose launch was abnormally silent and hasn't received much attention.
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External HDD Enclosures are plentiful and cheap these days. It's tough for a manufacturer to differentiate its products in the marketplace, and the competition on price is never-ending. Silverstone Technology has introduced a new product that is completely unique in the market, with a security system that you won't see anywhere else. Instead of relying on passwords to allow access to the encrypted data on the HDD, the SilverStone SST-TS01B uses a small RFID "Key" to identify an authorized user. This is not new technology, it's in commercial use in other markets, but it's the first time I've seen it used to unlock an encrypted HDD.
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Performance aside the GeForce 9500 GT offers consumers other things like compact size, a quiet cooler and low power consumption. The fact that it doesn't need any additional power connections means that it will make for an easy upgrade for many that don't have a power supply that is able to handle more devices. These strong areas make for great selling points not to mention that the GeForce 9500 GT can run F@H and is CUDA ready for parallel applications. In the future things like GPU video transcoding will be sure to take off and the GeForce 9500 GT can...
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The SteelSeries 7G Gamer Keyboard arrived Technic3D. A Gamer Keyboard with advanced key combinations, PS/2 buffer-system, switch lifetime of 50 million operations, audio ports for headphone-out and microphone-in and two port USB hub. One of the best Gamer Keyboards in the moment? See this in the following Review.
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Every hardware enthusiast should know the name XFX as they are synonymous with the fastest performing Nvidia products on the market. Whether you are shopping for the ultimate graphics card or the highest specification motherboard it is hard to go wrong with the XFX branded versions. High end is not their only area of expertise however and recently XFX offered us the opportunity to review a number of their value segment motherboards with onboard graphics, they told us that their products were capable of taking on the best AMD and Intel had to offer. This is quite a claim so after tracking down some impressive AM2/Socket 775 boards we put XFX to their word.
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Despite its recent troubles, NVIDIA has continued with its quest to populate its GeForce 9 series with tweaked versions of its GeForce 8 GPUs. We take a look at its new mainstream GPU, the GeForce 9500 GT and find out if it can distinguish itself from its predecessors. Also check out how the overclocked Zotac AMP! Edition fared.
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Anyone with a compact computer case will tell you that finding a good heatsink can be a daunting task. After tracking down the best heatsinks available for your budget, there's the question of heatsink heights to factor in. This is where the new Thermaltake DuOrb heatsink comes in. This heatsink features twin 80mm fans set side-by-side so cooling surface area isn't sacrificed for keeping the total heatsink height under 90mm. The DuOrb is novel in a couple of other aspects...
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I'm sure a fair number of you expected the VIA Nano L2100 to come out ahead because it operates at 1.8GHz, while the Intel Atom 230 runs at just 1.6Ghz, but there is more to it than the 12.5% difference in clock frequency. The VIA Nano processor is based on superior superscalar out of order architecture, which is why it performs better than the Intel Atom processor. The VIA Nano processor beat the Intel Atom processor in every single performance benchmark we ran and that says a ton for the engineers (Centaur Technologies) who designed the Nano processor...
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