GIGABYTE GeForce 7600GS Review 
Tech Gear :: Friday, December 29, 2006
“The meat of any gamers’ system is going to be the graphics processing capability and if you’re a serious gamer you know that all to well. However not all of us have pockets deeps enough that allow us to go out and buy a £400 graphics board. With PCI Express as the new standard for all major graphics board manufacturers it seems some of them have totally ditched their AGP boards. However, despite…”
XFX GF 8800GTX 575M SLI Review
Motherboards.org :: Friday, December 29, 2006
The 8800GTX is the fastest single graphics card on the market today bar none. The performance with two of them just flat outperforms everything on the market and then some when it works. Two of these cards working together in SLI flat out allows gamers to play games at Ultra High Resolution gaming like 2048×1536 or 2560×1600 with little trouble as long as the rest of the system including the PSU matches up to the requirements.
Win a Hanns-G 19″ Widescreen TFT
Tekbunker :: Friday, December 29, 2006
For this year’s Christmas competition we are giving away a Hanns-G 19 inch widescreen TFT, shipped right to the winners door, in a choice of 2 colours – Black, or Silver.
This competition is international, and to be eligible to enter you must have 20 non-spam posts. This competition will close on the 31st of December.
December Giveaway, HIS X1650 Pro Turbo Video Card
XYZ Computing :: Friday, December 29, 2006
It is the holiday season again so here is a gift to the forum members from the XYZ Computing staff. This time we will be giving away a HIS X1650 Pro Video Card from our private stash! This is a little different from our previous giveaways- all you need to do to enter is become a member and post your entry (no minimum amount of posts) and the duration is shorter than normal because I have some thing to take care of in January.
Connecting Both a DVD Recorder and a VCR to a Television
Robert Silva :: Friday, December 29, 2006
With the increasing popularity of DVD recorders, many consumers are facing the dilemma as to how to add a a new DVD recorder to their current VCR and Television setup simply. Here some useful tips to make this task easier.
Best Buy and Circuit City Get A Lump of Coal For Christmas
About Home Theater :: Friday, December 29, 2006
The fierce competition and price wars, amongst the major U.S. consumer electronics retailers, have delivered great Holiday Joy for consumers, looking for low prices, especially in the area of HDTVs. With stores such as Wal-mart and Costco offering more HDTVs, in both Flat Panel and Projection types, accompanied by bargain basement prices, have successfully put the pressure on Fry’s, Best Buy, and Circuit City to engage in an all-out price war to get customers into their stores for HDTV purchases. However, this state of affairs has delivered the “lump of coal” for the likes of Best Buy and Circuit City, which have reported a decrease in profits, due directly to the HDTV price war. For additional details, check out the folllowing reports by Phillip Swann of TV Predictions: Circuit City: Another Victim of HDTV Prices, and Are ‘Big Box” HD Stores Boxed In?.
After-Christmas And Clearance Sales – What You Need To Know
About Home Theater :: Friday, December 29, 2006
After-Christmas, Year-End, and Clearance sales are a great time get some good deals, but you can also end up with a purchase disaster. This is where the consumer needs to shop smart. Don’t just grab the newspaper AD and run down to your local consumer electronics retailer without arming yourself with useful knowledge and tools to get the most from your dollar.
NeoDigits Helios H4000 DVD Player with HDMI Output
About Home Theater :: Friday, December 29, 2006
The Helios H4000 is feature-packed DVD player with several innovative features. The H4000 can deliver 720p/1080i/1080p upscaled images through HDMI connectivity and/or component video connections. In addition, other features, Region Code Free and PAL/NTSC compatibility add to its flexibility. If you are looking for a new DVD player, whether to use with that new flat panel HDTV and surround sound system, make sure you check out the Helios H4000 as an option.
Klipsch Synergy Sub10 Powered Subwoofer 
About Home Theater :: Friday, December 29, 2006
The Klipsch Synergy Sub10 Powered Subwoofer is not just a powerful subwoofer. The Sub 10 also delivers a clarity, tightness, and undistorted deep bass response that you find on more expensive subs. My overall impression of the Klipsch Synergy Sub10 is extremely postive. It is a real five star winner. However, I would caution those that live in a second floor apartment, the downstairs neighbors will definitely take notice!
Mid-Range Graphics Card Warfare – AMD vs. nVidia
Tweak Town :: Thursday, December 28, 2006
“Today we have with us a total of four mid-range graphics cards – two from AMD and two from nVidia. While all cards are mid-range, it’s clear that they sit at different end of the scales – let’s call them low-end mid-range and high-end mid-range. The Radeon X1650XT and GeForce 7600GT sits at the lower end of the mid-range scale and at the other end we have the GeForce 7900GS and the Radeon X1950PRO. While offering high-end type performance, the 7900GS and X1950PRO still in belong at the mid-range level due to their pricing.”
Logitech Z-10 Interactive Speaker System Review 
XYZ Computing :: Thursday, December 28, 2006
What do you get when you mash up the LCD from Logitech’s G15 gaming keyboard and a set of stereo speakers? This is not a question that many people would ask, but Logitech’s designers must have because that is what we have in the Z-10 Interactive Speaker System. This 2.0 speaker system is part of Logitech’s new line of high-end tech luxury items known as their Advanced Peripherals. These match style with high performance in products that are not cheap, but will be finding their way on to a lot of wish-lists this holiday season. Of course, one of their main selling points is that the right speaker has an on-board LCD and a set of touch-sensitive controls that can interact with your computer to control the music and display.
HD-DVD Content Protection already hacked?
Tweak Town :: Thursday, December 28, 2006
“Some companies and consumers have said in various places around the Net that most HD-DVD’s will not come with content protection until around 2010 or so. While that seems the case as of right now, at any tick of the clock Hollywood could start implement content protection into their media. In any case, and as far as we can tell from software companies like CyberLink, if you don’t have HDCP support (graphics card + driver + monitor and so on), the ICT rule states that the player must stop playback after just a few seconds. And it does, we tested using a Windows XP system fully HDCP compliant using an Xbox 360 HD-DVD USB drive with The Bourne Supremacy which lacks content protection at this point and the newest version of PowerDVD Ultra indeed stops playback after a few seconds. In essence, this is worse, because if you go out and buy a HD-DVD movie, you won’t be able to watch the movie at all, let alone at a reduced resolution. Of course though, you could solve the problem by going out and buying an uber expensive HD-DVD player but who wants to spend that much money and what if you want to play the movies on your PC or any computer like device connection to your HD display?”
ASUS EAX1950PRO CROSSFIRE 256MB Graphics Card Review
Virutal Hideout :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
“With the ASUS EAX1950PRO and EAX1950PRO CROSSFIRE being under $200 each, the budget gamer will love its performance and price. Plus, for the same price as a 1950XTX, you can buy two 1950PRO’s and run them in Crossfire mode”
SteelSeries 3H Gaming Headset Review 
Think Computers :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
“Copenhagen, Denmark-based gaming gear company Soft Trading is a a relative newcomer to the gaming product market. You may have heard of Icemat or the SteelSeries, two of the company’s brands. SteelSeries is most well known for its Steelpad, an aluminum mouse pad, which ThinkComputers reviewed this past August, while Icemat is known for its namesake glass mouse pad. The SteelSeries Steelsound series of gaming headsets is comprised of the 3H, 4H, 5H, and 5H USB. This review is for the 3H, the series’ compact and inexpensive model.”
Albatron GeForce 7600 GS 256MB Review
Sharky Extreme :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Today on Sharky Extreme, we’ve reviewed the Albatron GeForce 7600 GS 256MB card:
Sapphire X1950 Pro 512Mb AGP
Driver Heaven :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The industries shift to the PCI-Express platform left many enthusiasts lacking the ability to update their graphics card. Because of that they were forced to either change their motherboard (often requiring they replace the CPU as well) or to keep their current hardware and hope that some day a quality AGP card would come out. Those who have been unable to afford the upgrade to PCIe have had very slim pickings this year, however Sapphire have announced the AGP version of one of the best cards of 2006 – the X1950Pro.
NGO ATI Optimized Driver v1.6.12
NGO HQ :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
The NGO ATI Optimized Driver is a modified version of the ATI Catalyst driver. The main purpose is to satisfy the users with better performance, image quality and compatibility. The NGO ATI Optimized Driver can enhance your experience in games, multimedia and general usage. This project is especially suited for enthusiasts and gamers that want to have the best gaming experience.
This driver includes ATI Control Panel and ATI Tray Tools by Ray Adams (Optional). We’ve preferred to include Control Panel over Catalyst Control Center due to the lower memory usage and flexibility. You can use ATI Tray Tools to take full control and to adjust advanced features while the Control Panel will give you basic control options. With ATI Tray Tools you can create game profiles and assign specific settings for each application.
Nouveau: A First Look
Phoronix :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
“Nouveau is a community project that is working on producing open-source 3D display drivers for NVIDIA’s graphics cards. Nouveau is not affiliated with NVIDIA Corporation and is an X.Org Foundation project. While this project is still far from being completed, for this holiday special we are sharing some of our first thoughts on this project from our experience thus far. We would like to make it very clear, however, that the Nouveau driver is no where near completed and still has a great deal of work ahead for the 3D component. This article today will also hopefully shed some light on the advancements of this project so far.”
LiteOn LH-2B1S Blu-Ray Drive
CDR Info :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
This is the first Blu-Ray PC drive from LiteOn. We examine the drive under various burning tests, both in CD/DVD and of course Blu-Ray media formats. In addition we measure all burned discs with DataRius Professional Tester and we present our thoughts at a 53pages long review.
FOXCONN 7950GT
Bjorn 3d :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
For those enthusiasts waiting for the prices on the new G80 hardware to come down or those holding out to see what ATI (and NVIDIA) has to offer early next year, but who still need a graphics card that can power their games for the interim, then cheaper but still powerful cards such as the 7950GT might easily suffice as a holdover until then. When the market eventually becomes inundated with DX10 graphic cards this coming Spring, availability is not certain but high introductory prices certainly are. Not everyone can or is willing to wait until the dust settles and prices on DX10 parts reach normal levels, especially those who may very shortly be receiving some new PC games under the Christmas tree!
Acer AL1916 19″ LCD
Monster Hardware :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
“Like most budget monitors the Acer AL1916 has a fixed base; that means no height adjustments and definitely no swiveling screen. What you will find on the back of the monitor in addition to the power & VGA connector is a DVI connector as well as an included DVI cable (Shock!). The literature I had on the AL1916 before it arrived hadn’t mentioned either of these items and I found their inclusion to be a pleasant surprise.”
Sound Blaster X-Fi Issues Explored
NGO HQ :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Back in May, we published an article and report about many issues reported on the latest Creative Labs product – The Sound Blaster X-Fi. A few weeks later Creative released information and blamed DDR Dual Channel for these related issues. And, after a few months, they changed their version and blamed Nvidia’s nForce4 for these issues, instead. Nvidia never responded to us about their side in the story, but they denied it on a chat.
We kept following this story and we received a lot of reports from users without nForce4 that claimed they had the same issues. So, to investigate these issues, we grabbed an X-Fi XtremeMusic from the closest hardware store and checked it out on the following motherboards: Asus M2R32-MVP, Asus A8N-SLI, Asus A8N32-SLI, ECS RS482-M and Gigabyte GA-965P. We used Windows XP SP2 with the latest updates and the latest drivers for all the devices. We also used the latest BIOS versions and ensured that the X-Fi was not sharing an IRQ with any other device by plugging it into non-shared PCI slot.
Sony Altus MDR-D777LP Headphones
Digital Trends :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
“The Sony Altus MDR-D777LP headphones reach an incredible frequency response of up to 80 kHz. Is this just a gimmick or a true breakthrough?”
Altec Lansing FX5051 5.1 Speaker System Review
Think Computers :: Wednesday, December 27, 2006
“There are so many great speaker systems for your PC, from 2.1, 5.1, even 7.1 systems, but to use them to their full potential you need a top of the line sound card. This is the dilemma a lot of people face when going out to get a new set of speakers. Well Altec Lansing has solved your problems with the FX5051 5.1 Speaker System. The system is able to deliver 5.1 surround sound without a 6-channel sound card, without any sound card at all! The FX5051 uses USB to bring surround sound to any computer without a sound card.”
