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Reviews Around The Web
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Choose Web Reviews from this Maker:
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Tuesday, May 6, 2008
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The latest processor series from AMD is a little unusual as it makes use of not one, two, or even four cores, but rather three! That's right, the new Phenom X3 carries an unusual core configuration, and I guess the question most of you are probably asking yourselves (as we did) is why? The most reasonable explanation is that this still allows AMD to sell Phenom X4 processors with a defective core, minimizing their loss. Second, it gives some leverage for AMD to compete with Intel's dual-core processors, being able to pull the "additional core" card.
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Vantec has added another member to the NexStar 360 lineup. The 3i boasts some things that we have not seen from Vantec in their many ages in the industry. In the past year or so we have seen motherboards feature energy efficiency, now we have it in hard drive enclosures. The 3i has an integrated controller that can regulate power to the drive resulting in less power consumption, less noise and longer drive life. Adding the real reason why we buy hard drive enclosures, which is for data storage, the new Vantec housing may be worth taking a look at.
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A little while ago, ThinkComputers reviewed the Zalman ZM500-HP 500W power supply unit. This time around, Zalman, maker of fine cooling products and power supplies, submitted for review a more powerful, but louder version of its line of power supply units, the ZM850-HP 850W. This 80PLUS-certified unit has lots of connectivity with its modular design, and two heatpipes and an ultra-quiet fan keep the unit virtually silent. The review is here.
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Today we are checking out a portable GPS device from Asus called the Asus R300. The R300 packs in all sorts of features like an FM transmitter and an internal GPS antenna. Volume levels for the spoken directions are very good making them easy to hear over road noise and loud kids or music. The built-in FM tuner can also send the directions to your cars speaker systems and allows you to listen to music and hear audio tracks with video over the car stereo system.
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Fortunately, since the PC Enclosure market is roughly organized into three segments; entry/OEM level, mid-range and performance/enthusiast, all you need to do to begin your case search, is to figure out which segment of the market fits your systems needs and zero your search down to that particular segment. Someone looking to spend between $25.00-$75.00 on their future system's enclosure need not waste their time exploring the expensive performance/enthusiast segment of the market, and so forth. Well, if part of your criteria is that you are on a budget or a first time builder, then usually the place to start is at the entry and budget mid-range levels. Once there, while parusing the current multitude of styles and designs, your eye would almost certainly be caught by the entry-to-mid-range NZXT offering: the ALPHA. The first time you see it, you'll think, "I bet that's what Darth Vader's desktop looks like." Today at Benchmark Reviews, we're going to find out if NZXT's latest in their Classic series line is just another....pretty face?
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Today's product comes to us form a South Korean company called ThermoLab. Even though the company has been doing business since 2003, the chances of many readers already knowing the company are slim. This is mainly due to the types of products the company has been producing until now. While most enthusiasts are looking for the largest heatsink they can fit in their system, many mainstream and server users are looking to keep their cases small. Small cases require smaller components, and believe it or not, smaller is getting to be a big deal.
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While NVIDIA's 65nm G92 core is an optimized derivative of NVIDIA's original 90nm G80 core to a certain extent, cards based on the G92 like the 8800GT and 8800GTS 512MB is nothing but a success amongst performance enthusiasts -- and there's a good reason why. Our previous review of the Asus 8800GT TOP back in January showed that, in general, the 8800GT is not only a very capable card in terms of 3D performance and comes at a great price depending on the board manufacturer and retailer you are purchasing from, but are also very power efficient for what it offers. Last month, we got another variation of the 8800GT for our review -- this time, from Gigabyte. The Gigabyte GeForce 8800GT TurboForce 512MB is not just about great performance, however. Utilizing a shorter, unique signature Gigabyte-blue non-reference PCB, along with a Zalman copper cooler, combined with Gigabyte's custom overclocking and overvolting software to squeeze the heck out of this card, how does it step up against the rest? Let's check this card out and run it through our set of benchmarks. And of course -- overclocking.
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Lian Li certainly put a lot of thought into the design of this case, even taking the time to implement the classic separate thermal zone design that is common to many full-tower and server cases. Can this case wow us like the PC-A17 did, though? Continue on as we find out.
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Aztech's HomePlug series of powerline Ethernet adaptors has always been easy to set up and use and their latest 200Mbps model, the HL109E is no different.
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Zotac's AMP! Edition graphics cards have featured impressively high clock speeds and the company applies this formula to NVIDIA's new single card flagship, the GeForce 9800 GTX 512MB. Does the extreme overclocking work as intended? Check out what we thought.
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Cooler Master's Real Power M850 power supply is one of the first power supplies that has six 12V rails. This should be enough power for all your SLI or CrossFire needs. Like many other PSUs today, the M850 comes with a high gloss reflective case and a large number of connectors.
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In this review Frostytech will be testing a low profile Intel socket 775 heatsink which could be ideal for 2U sized server chassis, small formfactor PCs and other media center microATX-style cases which are seriously height limited. The Thermolab Micro Silencer TLI-S heatsink uses a simple swagged aluminum fin and heatpipe construction, weighs a feathery 276 grams and comes with a pre-applied patch of 8 W/mK rated gray thermal interface material.
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Akasa's AK-TT12-80 double sided Thermal Adhesive Tape comes in a small 80mm x 80mm square, about 0.3mm thick, from which you cut out a small square the appropriate size for your application. The thermal interface material has a thermal conductivity of 0.9 W/mK, and is double-sided to ensure bonding with the IC and heatsink. Peel adhesion is rated at 1200g/inch2 - or 1.2kg per square inch.
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Today we take a look at Diamond's lower cost, mainstream Radeon HD 3650 that increases total on-board memory to 1GB, but in doing so, uses lower cost, slower GDDR2 chips. In the pages ahead, we'll aim to find out if additional on-board memory really impacts performance more so than a smaller footprint of faster GDDR3 memory. The answer may definitely surprise you...
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Tuniq has recently come out with a new series of power supplies called the "Miniplant". This new line of power supply comes in three versions: 1200W, 1000W, and 950W. In this upcoming review, we will be going over the 950W Miniplant power supply. So what exactly is the Miniplant, now that we know it isn't a nuclear device? It's a 950W powerhouse packed into a standard-sized PSU enclosure. With this type of power and small footprint, this power supply would be geared to the mobile gamer, who needs that extra bit of wattage for their SLI/CrossFire setups without the extra acreage. Some of the prominent features of the Miniplant are the high efficiency 80+ certification, multiple circuit protection, active PFC, and a plethora of cable connections to keep everyone happy.
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