ECS KA3 MVP Motherboard Review
The TechZone :: Tuesday, November 07, 2006
ECS has made some amazing strides in the last few years. They’ve gone from making low cost, low performance motherboards to being an serious contender in the enthusiast market. ECS has a solid performing motherboard with the KA3 MVP. This motherboard has all the feature that most hardware enthusiast would crave. The only downside to the KA3 is something that is common to all ECS motherboards – they’re not very good overclockers. The KA3 does improve on the KA1 in the overclocking department, but only slightly. However, at the price KA3 MVP sells for, you are getting a great bang for your performance buck.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA II
AOA Forums :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“Can you hear that? Me either, the drive is silent. I powered the drive on by jumping the power supply, and not a peep was heard. Noise isn’t an issue for me, so I considered this a bonus.
The SATA drive (as expected) completely obliterated the older ATA100 drive, beating it consistently by 41%.”
Hi-Techreviews.com Holiday Contest
Hi Tech Reviews :: Monday, November 06, 2006
We are pleased to announce our Holiday Contest the rules for it can be found in our forum. Stop by and participate and have a chance at winning one of the six prizes we are giving away for this contest.
The Real Smashing Pumpkins: Punkin’ Chunkin’ in the USA
Futurelooks :: Monday, November 06, 2006
So what do you do with that burnt out Jack O’Lantern and that stockpile of pumpkins? Well, you could wait a week for them to ripen up and toss them at your neighbours yard, but that’s boring compared to what we have in store for you. How about seeing how far you can launch the sucker with the help of some bored engineers and physicists?
SteelPad QcK heavy mouse pad
Modders Inc :: Monday, November 06, 2006
SteelSeries has been producing high quality mouse pads for several years. The original pads (SteelPad 4D and SteelPad 4S) proved that SteelSeries had a great product. SteelSeries now offers 9 different mouse pads to choose from. Today we are taking a look at one of their cloth mouse pads called the SteelPad QcK heavy.
Logitech G11 Gaming Keyboard Review
ASE Labs :: Monday, November 06, 2006
” What do you get when you take a Logitech G15 keyboard and remove the LCD? A Logitech G11 keyboard that is only a bit cheaper. The G11 is a strange product that probably won’t find to much market space. ”
Get Down to Earth With GPS
BTX Form Factor :: Monday, November 06, 2006
Global positioning has grown from a military feature to a must-have electronic gadget. Although the possibilities for use are still growing, today GPS is still an add-on feature, but within a few years it could become standard equipment. The tech savvy generation growing up today will probably look at the compass and think it ancient…
Cooler Master Mars and Eclipse CPU Coolers Review 
Big Bruin :: Monday, November 06, 2006
Both of these coolers feature unique designs which definitely grab your attention, as well as providing respectable cooling performance. The Eclipse and Mars coolers performed much better than the stock AMD CPU cooler, and allowed an AMD X2 4200 AM2 processor to be kept cool even while overclocked.
ECS 945G-M3 M-ATX Motherboard Review
Gruntville :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“As the basis for a HTPC, this is an excellent choice. The board was designed to be used as a stable platform for desktop and HTPC use and it does this job with aplomb. I feel that anyone looking for an inexpensive motherboard for a HTPC will find this board offers everything they are looking for, including the low price.”
Intel X6800 Core 2 Extreme
Viper Lair :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“How the CPU architecture communicates with the memory is one part of the equation. Another part is how the architecture processes data. Before, CPU instructions would break up the data into small bits and executing them at the same time. How it changes now is the processor will combine similar instructions and execute them at the same time. This method is far more efficient and there is less latency involved.”
Antec P180B Case
Modders Inc. :: Monday, November 06, 2006
The P180 is truly a revolutionary breakthrough in case design. Dual chambers isolate the power supply and CPU into separate cooling zones with up to 5 configurable fans. Three-layer sound-deadening panels dampen noise even in very high-performance systems. Ease-of-use, sleek design and Antec’s reputation for quality make the P180 worthy of being the first in a new category we call the Advanced Super Mid Tower.
Arctic Cooling Accelero X1 VGA Cooler Review
Futurelooks :: Monday, November 06, 2006
Swiss have come up with yet another cooling solution. Only this time, it is for your super hot 3D Graphics cards. The Accelero X1 boasts super quiet operation, with extra cooling power. Can this product pull both feats off without compromise? Let’s find out!
OpenOffice : The Free Office Software Suite Everyone Should Know About 
Tweak news :: Monday, November 06, 2006
Thankfully, computer users can now enjoy the benefits of having free software that is actually far superior and useful to many of the products available for a hefty price in the retail market . For example, the Firefox browser is much more versatile and handy (think extensions) than any other web browser that can be used on any operating system—Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris and many other esoteric variations. Ditto for OpenOffice.”
T Adamas Aluminum ATX Case
Bjorn 3d :: Monday, November 06, 2006
If it wasn’t enough that NZXT is crafting some of the finest cases available to the market today, they are also reinventing the wheel; with success. The tool-less panel design incorporated in the Adamas is one of the most durable latch systems I have yet to see. You won’t find more then a bottle-cap worth of plastic used to build this case; and even then we’re talking about small pieces used to secure drive doors and make cushion feet for the case. It really seems as though the marketing department over at NZXT didn’t have to stretch the imagination in describing this case.
Zalman CNPS8000 Low Profile CPU Cooler Review
Madshrimps :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“A compact CPU cooler from Zalman for those small cases and office PCs, carrying the CNPS ultra quiet tag, we find out if it lives up to Zalman reputation of silent computing.”
nVidia High-End Graphics Cards for Second Hand Buyers
Tweak Town :: Monday, November 06, 2006
We’re going to be having a look at the current cream of the crop nVidia cards to see what you want to buy with those hard earned dollars of yours. We will have a brief look at the cards but our main intention will be to see how they fair in a straight out comparison in our normal array of benchmarks. We will be looking at five cards today – the 7900GS Extreme from XFX starts the roundup off. From there we will be looking at the highly popular 7900GT. The newly released 7950GT is next on the list with the original bad boy of high-end, the 7900GTX and finally we will be throwing in the 7950GX2 which no doubt will be hitting the second hand market hard and fast.
SuperTalent PC3500 CL2 2GB Memory Review at 3DXtreme
3d Xtreme :: Monday, November 06, 2006
Since being introduced to our first SuperTalent ram products just over 2 years ago we have seen a small company hit the mainstream. In the beginning we dealt with a distributor as a go between for product to review and gain the exposure. Now SuperTalent products are popping up at Newegg and into the mainstream vendors. It just goes to show how a small company putting out a quality product can make it big. With that we are looking at a 2GB kit of DDR ram today. While DDR seems to be on it’s way out slowly in the PC world, making way for DDR2 and DDR3, companies are still putting out some solid product for the enthusiast. Let’s have a look…
Does RAID0 Really Increase Disk Performance?
Hardware Secrets :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“RAID0, also known as data striping, can be used if you want to increase your PC disk performance, being recommended to high-end PCs. It works by accessing two identical hard disk drives in parallel, so in theory it doubles the data transfer rate between the computer and the hard disk drives. We were very curious to see if RAID0 really increases the hard disk performance and how it reflects on PC overall performance, so we set a RAID0 system, benchmarked our system and compared it to the same system with just one hard disk drive installed. We set our RAID0 with several different stripe sizes, from 4 KB to 128 KB, to check which configuration would give us the best performance. Check it out.”
ATI Catalyst 6.10 with Control Panel
NGO HQ :: Monday, November 06, 2006
We have noticed that some people still prefer to use the old ATI Control Panel over the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). As a result we have decided to incorporate the Control Panel into the newly released Catalyst 6.10s. This time – we removed the automatic DeviceID detection from the old Control Panel (means it will work with the newest Radeon cards as well).
Catalyst 6.10 Comparison 
Technic 3d :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“Catalyst 6.10 Comparison on Technic3D. Faster then Catalyst 6.9? See you in the following Catalyst Roundup up to Catalyst 6.4.”
Cooler Master Hyper 6+ Review
Techwarelabs :: Monday, November 06, 2006
There seems to be two main ways companies are engineering their new heatsinks, up or out. Now, one of the big problems with these massive heatsinks is that they have compatibility problems with motherboards and cases. Today we’ll be looking at the Coolermaster Hyper 6+ which was created on the concept of “up”
Spire Pininfarina Review 
XYZ Computing :: Monday, November 06, 2006
The hardware manufacturer Spire has made a bit of a reputation for itself by producing cooling products, like stock replacement CPU coolers, but recently has done seen some growth. In a rather ambitious move they teamed up with the designer Pininfarina to produce the computer case that we will be looking to in this article. The Pininfarina is a complex and interesting enclosure, definitely not what I would have expected from Spire or a company new to this segment of the hardware market. We had a chance to spend some time with one, so let’s see how Spire did with this performance enclosure.
Noctua NF-S12 120mm Fan
Overclockers Online :: Monday, November 06, 2006
The Noctua NF-S12 fans are nothing short of amazing products. Performance results through testing against similar products only produces relative results. EMB Papst has specialized, designed and produced fans and blowers for years now and it is quite a feat for a brand new company such as Noctua to be able to match such quality and performance. Not only do these fans perform extraordinarily well, but Noctua has also included an excellent set of accessories including rubber grommets and a 5V fan adaptor.
Thermaltake Kandalf LCS Liquid Cooled Case Review 
Tweaknews :: Monday, November 06, 2006
“ThermalTake took one of the best cases on the market, and only upgraded it with a component that made a difference. The liquid cooling system included with the Kandalf LCS proves to be a great performer, while not adding too much complexity.”
AMD “Fusion” Vision for the Future – on-die GPU
Overclock 3d :: Friday, November 03, 2006
“Further to our press release about the AMD/ATI merger, I thought I’d fill our readers in on AMD’s plans for the future and tell you what I think. The on-die GPU, x86 instruction set for the on-die GPU and a brief coverage of Torrenza is included.”
1701 A.D. Review
Technic 3d :: Friday, November 03, 2006
“1701 A.D. from Sunflowers comes into the Editorship from Technic3D. Ready for the third Island colonize? See you in the following Review.”
Sapphire Radeon X1950XTX 512MB Graphics Card Review
Virtual Hideout :: Friday, November 03, 2006
“The graphics card in the crosshairs for this review is the Sapphire ATI Radeon X1950XTX. A bit of a mouthful, but it only gets better with some of the features. Like 512MB of GDDR4, HD AVIVO, Dual DVI ,VIVO, PCI Express x16 Lane 32bit Bus, ATI CrossFire Ready, and Windows Vista Ready.”
Alienware Responds to Hardware Blackmail
Fast Silicon :: Friday, November 03, 2006
“In response to a recent report concerning Alienware’s system review process, Alienware would like to take the opportunity to clarify that process. As a matter of long standing policy, Alienware makes no distinctions on who receives a system for review. Alienware offers an equal opportunity to all publications for system reviews. In addition to offering review units to publications, Alienware offers reviewers a unique guidance approach that is available at any point during the review process.”
abit Fatal1ty AN9 32X Motherboard Review
PC Modding Malaysia :: Friday, November 03, 2006
“Overall, the Fatal1ty AN9 32X is a pretty decent socket AM2 motherboard. Based on the successful NVIDIA nForce 590 SLI chipset, abit has done a good job with the Fatal1ty AN9 32X. With its red coloured PCB and underbody red LEDs, this motherboard is probably the coolest looking socket AM2 motherboards in the market, provided if red is your favourite colour. The QTES GT heatpipe cooling also worked flawlessly but it would have been better to have the SB heatsink heatpiped as well. We also had almost no issues with the board layout but we hate the fact that the space between the secondary PCI-E slot and PCI slot was too tight. This will be bad news for those who plan to run SLI and pair up a decent soundcard on this motherboard.”
Palit 7900GS Sonic 256MB
Driver Heaven :: Friday, November 03, 2006
When a certain game proves to be too much for a graphics card to handle, the cheapest solution is to try and overclock the board. This process is getting easier as the years pass with ATI supporting it “out of the box” on most of their cards and nVidia only requiring a small registry tweak to access their overclocking features (via coolbits). It comes as no surprise that card manufacturers like to use the same tactic to gain an edge over the competition by building the increased clock speeds into their bioses. The Palit 7900GS Sonic we are reviewing is one such product. While an overclocked card in itself doesn’t have any real advantage over a reference one (after all you can overclock it yourself) a good cooler included in the package might just be enough to tip the scales in favour of the faster board.
