Wed Reviews

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Noctua is a new company that promises quiet cooling with good performance. Their first entry into the market is very well built.

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SOYO was established in 1999 at the time when computer hardware was easy to list off in your head. Their Dragon series of motherboards were excellent and many enthusiasts employed their boards for computer builds. Today, SOYO is a vastly different company. Gone are the motherboards but SOYO has reinvented itself and now produces displays. They have a partnership with Honeywell for dual branding. Today, we are looking at the Topaz S 24" LCD Widescreen Monitor.

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Thermaltake is a company that is very well know to the enthusiast computer builder community. They provide many great products including a line of heavy (as in weight) power supplies, modding, cooling, and cases. ThermalTake was founded in 1999 and has really grown every since. They have always put out good looking products and the SopranoRS 101 is no different. Let's take a closer look.

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* Most cooler reviews are of products designed for the latest, greatest and usually hottest GPUs. But what if you have an older system, with a once powerful 6600GT or x800? The fan dies or you want to squeeze a few more MHZ in your OC, where do you turn? Well, Gigabyte of all companies have made the Cyclops, which comes with changeable front covers, RAM sinks and a solid aluminium core. Let's see how our 6600GT feels with it attached.

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A-Data continues to innovate the USB Flash Drive segment with new and unique designs. The Sport series features a sturdy metal frame with rubber padding, to make it durable for use during outdoor activities. A-Data's Sport S702 will sure go well on any key chain.

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Paragon Hard Disk Manager 2008 is a program suite from Paragon that promises to make everything around the hard drive easy. It can defrag your hard drives, make it easy to take an image and restore it and even make sure that any data you want removed stays removed. After using it for over a month my personal feeling is that this is a great toolkit for both novice and experienced users. Read on to find out why.

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You wouldn't know by looking, but Intel's a little new at the chipset business. It's not that they haven't been doing it for decades, but just that they've never made a business out of it. Until recently. Intel's 975X did well; i965 blew doors off hinges. And, though it's a little long in the technospheric tooth, i965's footprint is almost too big to fill. Without presuming that its successor, P35, is shiny and better, I've tested what looks like a crowd-pleaser: Asus' P5K-E WiFi- AP. For less than $150, it's priced right where everyone can reach it, and comes with the right amount of flash to nab attention from the rest.

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If I say Razer, immediately everyone says, Boomslang! The mouse that was superior compared to other gaming mice. Razer's motto is, for gamers, by gamers. They design their products in cooperation with pro gamers and everyone at Razer are actually gamers as well. It's nice to see that their philosophy is a way of life carried into their products as well. What we are looking at today is their latest mouse, apart from the recently launched special edition boomslang. It's the Razer Diamondback 3g Gaming mouse.

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While the relatively new line of Extreme Edition memory products by = A-Data still carry the Vitesta model name, the EE modules offer very = aggressive timings, more comparable to other manufacturers of high-end = performance memory. It is one of these sets of memory sticks I will be = taking a look at today, the ADQVD1A16K 2x1GB PC2 6400 Extreme Edition = DDR2-800+ Dual Channel Memory Kit.

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We take a look at the newest DFI Intel motherboard, based on the X38 chipset, the successor of the high end version of the P35. Can DFI work their magic and produce a tweakers dream X38 board? We find out.

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The HIS Radeon HD 3850 IceQ3 comes with a high end dual slot cooler, 512 MB of fast GDDR3 memory and increased clocks at a price tag of $199. This winning combination gets very close in performance to the much more expensive HD 3870 and can even surpass it when overclocked.

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After looking at the new 9600GT just the other day, it became clear to us that the HD 3870 really does still have some life in it. It's not dying off anytime soon thanks to the aggressive pricing that has been implemented recently. It did get us thinking though; with an MSI HD 3870 OC sitting around doing nothing, it was time to see what would happen when we put overclocked part up against overclocked part. It's really going to come down to how well the HD 3870 is able to make use of the increased clock speeds that MSI have offered.

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Quote: Altec Lansing's SnugFit design does indeed provide great noise isolation to the user. As we used our various MP3 players from Apple and Cowon, we found the UHP336 to be one of the better headsets we have had in our ear. For me personally, I wanted better base response for the headphones and was annoyed by the amount of adjustment I had to keep making to hold the headphones in the sweet spot of my ear canal. This is most likely due to the weight of the headphone and cord...

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Another reason to use expansion cards rather than onboard SATA controller would be free up the resource for other uses. In addition, SATA expansion cards often offer extra features and have wider support for multiple operating systems that are not found with onboard SATA controller. All of current motherboards will only work with Windows and/or Linux but not Mac due to the fact that Mac operating system usually comes with pre-designed components unlike PC counterparts. Despite the fact that the underlying hardware and chipset maybe same, the drivers are simply not there for a Mac system to use PC components (of course you can always use boot camp or the hacked operating system but that is not truly running under Mac OS). This is where the expansion cards can be useful.

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Even though the EVGA e-GeForce 8800 GS comes with just 96 shaders and 12 ROPs it can easily compete with AMD HD3850 and HD3870. The card offers great price/performance and is very very quiet. With up to 30% overclocking this card is every overclocker's dream being able to surpass the much more expensive 8800 GT when overclocked.

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As we went into the 4th quarter of 07, Toshiba and the HD DVD camp was certain they had this wrapped up. Their player prices were well below the Blu-Ray offerings, they had picked up several new studios and Sony's PS3 was looking more like an anchor on Sony's future than a help to Blu-Ray. In addition, they seemed to believe that Time Warner was going to go exclusively HD DVD shortly after the end of the year and had planned a massive announcement with Microsoft for CES.

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Motherboards are at the heart of every computer, and their importance is central to stable system operation. No matter if you are a low-demand office worker who plugs away on letters or spreadsheets or if you are a high-performance hardware enthusiast who demands extreme framerates from your video games, one component alone will determine your ability: the motherboard. Because everything rides on the system mainboard, it must be based on a solid and dependable foundation. Gigabyte isn't a new name to the industry, and for years now they have offered some of the most reliable and stable motherboard sold. In fact, over the past year there really only seemed to be two realistic options for motherboard manufacturer's when you shopped for new hardware; and Gigabyte was one of them. In this article Benchmark Reviews challenges our reigning champion against the Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 Ultra Durable 2 DES motherboard.

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Speaking of temperatures, the Zalman GPU after-market cooler on the 8800GT TurboForce is a godsend and certainly keeps the temperatures in the lowest range we've again seen on any stock 8800 series card. It averages 10 degrees Celsius cooler than any other card we've tested in this performance range. Even when this card was overclocked to a gargantuan level we only experienced a load temperature of 52 degrees Celsius, which is amazing!

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Going back to performance, at stock speeds, the K9A2 Platinum performed very well with the Phenom 9600 Black, despite the TLB issue which never affected us. The 790FX platform as a whole is quite solid and shows a lot of promise. Provided you're planning to stay closely within specifications, we think the MSI K9A2 Platinum AMD 790FX motherboard is a solid and reliable platform but the overclocking results surely vary depending on the processor you have.

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Though the memory manufacturers are still designing and building new DDR2 memory modules, DDR3 memory is here and being used. There are plenty of motherboards out there that utilize DDR3 memory, and new modules are being introduced monthly. No, you have probably not yet heard of Aeneon. Aeneon is a division of a German company Qimonda, the world's third largest manufacturer of DRAM, part of Infineon Technologies AG. So, there is really nothing new about Aeneon but the name.