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Reviews Around The Web
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010
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Western Digital has been the leading name in consumer storage technology since the early 1970's. Just in time for their 40th anniversary, the WD SiliconEdge-Blue Solid State Drive debuts as the first consumer SSD they've ever offered. Based on the JMicron JMF612 SATA-3Gbps SSD processor, the SiliconEdge-Blue promises 250/170Mbps read and write transfers with 5000-4KB IOPS. In this article Benchmark Reviews tests the WD SiliconEdge-Blue SSD, 256GB model SSC-D0256SC-2100, against a myriad of high-performance solid-state enthusiast storage devices.
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If you could design your own laptop in an effort to have the perfect balance of performance, price, size, weight, and features, what would you include and what could you live without? As part of its Blue Label program, Best Buy asked that question of its customers--accepting as much feedback as its customers could give and then channeling that information back to the laptop manufacturers it partners with. The ensuing results of this feedback now manifest themselves in the three current Best Buy Blue Label exclusive laptop offerings: the Dell Studio s15Z-2249CPN, Sony Vaio VPCS11FM/S, and Toshiba Satellite E205-S1904.
All three of these laptops have a fair bit in common: They are all mainstream laptop designs, powered by Intel Core i5 processors, they come with 4GB of DDR3 SDRAM memory, and include generous 500GB hard drives. (They are somewhat diminutive as mainstream laptops go, but they're not quite thin-and-light laptops either.) The Toshiba (14-inch display, 2.53GHz Core i5) is the least expensive of the group, with an $899.99 price tag (which was just reduced from $999.99); the Dell (15.6-inch display, 2.53GHz Core i5) sells for $999.99, and the Sony (13.3-inch display, 2.26GHz Core i5) is the most expensive, at $1,049.99. In our opinion, however, the Toshiba is the sexiest-looking of the bunch, and we were fortunate enough to get it in for testing.
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"I had high hopes for Thermaltake's ISGC-300 cooler. I liked the design and it was very easy to install on the 775 platform, although the mobo may have to be removed for installation, even for AMD users."
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"I haven?t had the opportunity until now to actually have a Raidmax product in my hands. I do remember looking deeply some time ago at their cases when I bought my first case outside of an OEM built computer. At that time I passed for some reason or another, but I am here today to give Raidmax a fair unbiased shakedown, as I really have nothing to go on for build quality or feature expectations. What I do know is that most of the time, Raidmax products don?t tend to empty your wallet when purchasing their products.
While Raidmax offers coolers and power supplies, I have been given a chassis from the Elite series of their chassis?. This group includes ten various chassis designs and variations within some of those ten designs as well. The chassis we are going to look at today for example is one variation of four in its design. Nothing odd here, I have seen this done by many companies, as personal tastes can vary and manufacturers try to accommodate as many as reasonably possible. Changing LED colors or having a windowed panel version is a very common practice."
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" The Puget Systems Echo I is built upon the Zotac IONITX-F-E ATOM N330 Mini-ITX platform. It is housed within an Antec case and is slightly smaller in size than an Xbox 360. The base model comes with 2 GB of DDR2 memory, a slim line Sony DVD-RW Drive, Western Digital Scorpio 160GB 7200 RPM Hard Drive and Windows 7 Home Premium Edition. It is customizable when ordering with choices in OS, slim drive type, memory amount and hard drive size."
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The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP8 is a credit card-sized ultra-compact point and shoot camera that packs a surprising number of features. Thanks to its size and compact nature it looks very stylish and will fit easily into your pockets as well, making it an excellent travel companion.
The FP8 is slim and lightweight thanks to its aluminum body. A retracting internal lens with folding optics means that the front is flat. There?s a large 2..7 inch LED screen at the back and blue-lit buttons on the side of the screen for navigation controls. The camera is quick to start up and if you?ve owned a Lumix before, you?ll be very comfortable with the stable of features. These include a simple camera mode, a picture viewer mode, a movie mode and a controls mode where you can mess around with the camera?s configuration and set it for daytime shots or nighttime shots, configure pixel size, etc.
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"OCZ Z Series is the 80 Plus Gold-certified power supply family from OCZ, and so far they released an 850 W and a 1,000 W model. Let's see if the 1000 W model will live up to the expectation."
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"For social networking addicts, theres no better cellphone interface than Motoblur. Motorolas innovative Android overlay aggregates all your social media accounts, and delivers the latest messages and information updates via what looks like comic book quote balloons conveniently splayed across the phones home screen. Previously available only on the Motorola Cliq from T-Mobile, Motoblur now comes to Verizon on the Motorola Devour, a sleek-if-bulky new Android phone encased in luxurious extruded aluminum. Motoblur, matched with a capacious four-line slide-out QWERTY keyboard, makes Devour arguably the easiest way to stay in touch without talking, and offers an overall attractive package of features and functions. But how does Devour match up with Verizons other Android phones, the similar Droid and the HTC Eris?"
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"Of all the tech appliances you might want to prominently display, a mundane network attached storage device probably falls about 78th on most peoples lists, right after VoIP desk phones and before network switches. LaCies Network Space 2 may change that. The attractive 1TB NAS sports an exterior design as clean and intuitive as the software that runs it. As we found out, its also just as basic as its shape but entry-level consumers might not mind the lack of high-end features or Formula One performance."
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"Kingston has a reputation for creating some extremely high quality memory. What this means is that we tend not to see the company jump on the speed train as quick as some other makers do. They want to know when they release a module that it's going to run 100% across many platforms.
Due to the nature of this, what tends to happen is we see only major step-ups in speed. To give you a better idea from Kingston, we see at the top of the table the 2133MHz DDR kit we have with us today. Moving downwards and we've got 2000MHz which was a major release, while below that there are 1800MHz DDR, 1600MHz DDR and 1333MHz DDR modules."
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Kingston thought of everything when it comes to designing an SSD drive for the notebook market at large. The drive has adequate performance, but it is primary designed to slide into the enclosure and work as an external drive hooked up through the USB interface which allows up to 480Mb/s of bandwidth between the two devices. The SATA 2 interface is not necessary as the bundle includes an enclosure to work with notebook PCs that have limited expansion bays and may not fit an SSD drive internally .At the end of the day, the Kingston Notebook Replacement drive is a SSD drive with all of the positives you could want and is available online for under $300 making it a good fit for those wanting a SSD drive without paying the high price of some others on the market that may offer higher performance but cost more. The Kingston 128GB Notebook Upgrade Kit is available at most e-tailors and many PC DYI centers.
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The most appealing thing about the Intel D510MO Mini-ITX motherboard with 1.66GHz Intel Atom dual core processor was that it could be used as the core of a completely silent system. Since the board is passively cooled, you can pick other passively cooled or solid state components for a build that generates absolutely zero noise.
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?In Win isn?t a widely known company, but it is slowly starting to get to there. Their unique cases are a different from the norm and the In Win Fanqua Mid Tower Chassis that we have to review today is no exception. Supporting up to nine drives the Fanqua houses four fans: three 120mm and one 220mm blue LED fan which lights up the entire case. In Win has also developed many tool-free devices to help ensure a fast and easy installation. Read on further to find out more about this case."
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"Whenever somebody starts gunning for the iPhone, we breathe a heavy sigh. Call it callous, but after watching even the most promising iPhone killers skid on their faces, it just hurts our little hearts too much to hang our hopes on one more, only to see it hit the pavement."
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"Gigabyte has designed a slightly overclocked (+10MHz) version of the Radeon HD 5670 videocard called the GV-567OC-1GI. ATI has produced several 'sweet spot' videocards over the past year like the Radeon HD 4870, 4850 and 4770, and through aggressive pricing and new manufacturing techniques ATI has managed to get all of these videocards into that $100-$150 'sweet spot' that net excellent gaming performance at a cut-rate price. Will the GV-567OC-1GI be worthy to join such hallowed company?"
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