Monday Reviews

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The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, LDAP for short, is a 'fork' of the original X.500 specification for Directory Access Protocol. This X.500 was large and heavy. It also required an OSI protocol stack to run. LDAP was made to be leaner and able to run on top of TCP/IP instead of the OSI complete stack. Active Directory, the directory software that many Windows based enterprise networks use, is LDAP at its heart. Directory services can provide many benefits to a home network or a business. With LDAP setup, it is relatively easy to setup a single sign-on on every computer or have a global address book. The first step is the installation which is very easy on Ubuntu.

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Honeywell makes products that fit nearly every market. Since they have a partnership with SOYO, they have also entered the computer peripheral consumer space. One of their first products to be released is the SecuraDrive. It is a 1.8" USB hard drive built for the security conscious.

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This is an editorial about my experiences with the Intel DX38BT motherboard. It is not a review, so please do not take it as such. There are no benchmarks and no testing. There was just annoyance. If you are looking for a review of the DX38BT, search on the web. ASE Labs will not be reviewing this board.

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Flash drives are really ubiquitous. If you look around your computer desk, you will probably find a few USB mass storage devices near your work area. They are a boon for taking documents from one computer to the next and are fast and simple to use. They replaced the floppy that the ZIP disk could not supplant. The one area that USB flash drives are lacking is the ability to boot. Even though many computer motherboards support USB booting, it is difficult to get the right combination. Using this guide, you will be able to make a bootable USB "hard drive."

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* Well it's finally here, the 9 series of GPUs has hit the shelves and the reviews have already poured in thick and fast. I know we're a little behind everyone else on this one, but our 9600GT review is a bit different. Vvikoo's monstrous 9600, comes with a whopping Zalman heatsink and some hefty factory overclocking. Let's see what it's made of.

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Recently ago we looked at some liquid pro, a couple of liquid metal pads. And now it's time to see some more competitors and put them all in one round up. We've received a bunch of Tuniq TX2, Arctic Cooling MX2. Arctic Silver is also in the pool with their award winning AS5. And we include Coollaboratory's Liquid pro and Liquid metal pads to make the circle complete.

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Audiotrak has launched an external USB device, Maya EX5 CE. It differs from the previous Maya EX5 product only in colors. The title of the new product now includes CE, which stands for Crystal Edition. Unfortunately, such a nice name did not affect technical characteristics of the device, all parameters remain the same.

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Like most people neither wear designer clothes nor live in villas, most users cannot afford expensive powerful graphics cards like GeForce 8800GTX or RADEON HD 3870 X2 and choose cheaper solutions instead. So, this time we are going to review three Mid-End graphics cards of the $100-$180 price range and a more expensive HD 3870. All our contenders today are based on AMD (ATI) RADEON GPUs.

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What would it take to get more Linux users playing video games? A better selection of native games for the Linux platform? It has been tried over and again with very limited results. But perhaps it's worth trying again, this time with real, obtainable tools and help? Enter Garage Games.

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The latest HD 3870 X2 to make its way into the labs comes in the form of a stock clocked Sapphire. We actually haven't checked out the X2 on our new test bed in any real detail, so we'll have to see how it goes here today. If you're looking for a HD 3870 X2 that doesn't do anything but produce some good numbers, this could be the card for you. Fortunately, there is only one way to find out so let's get stuck into the card and see what we have on our hands today before we get into the benchmarks.

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It seems to me that every manufacturer in the industry is getting into the power supply business. We have seen memory makers, such as OCZ and Corsair, graphic card makers, such as BFG, and cases manufacture, such as NZXT and Tuniq are making power supplY. Combine these newcomers to the old and established power supply makers, such as Antec, Enermax, and Seasonics, we are having a big battle among power supplies. Even so, it does not deter other manufacturers from entering the arena and tries to fight against all odds to hopefully come out as a winner.

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Whether you like it or not, if you are big into the use of external peripherals, you will sooner or later being taking a hard look at a USB hub in your future. There will never be enough USB connections on your motherboard and realistically, who wants to have a rats nest of USB cable running to and from the front and rear of your computer when with one neat connection you can have seven components connected with no problems.

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FSP group first opened its doors in 1996. A decade later they have built themselves into one of the top 10 suppliers of power conversion products in the world. The 700 watt FX700 FX-Epsilon we are testing today is touted as a high efficiency, quiet operation, SLI ready, ATX V2.2 compliant unit. Well, we'll just see about that. Nurse, bring us our screwdrivers! (shaken, not stirred).

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If you are a computer enthusiast then you have heard of Lian Li. They make some of the best cases out there and have been doing it for years. One of my favorite cases of all time was the Lian Li PC-6089 case, to bad you can't really find it anymore. Today we are looking at a brand new case from Lian Li, the PC-A77. It features an all aluminum design, removable motherboard tray, and so many features that you just won't find on other cases. Let's take a look and see if Lian Li can impress us again.

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A while back I took a look at a decent wireless FM transmitter for transmitting music from your portable audio player to your cars' radio, today for review I've got the 2nd version of that, aptly named the Wireless FM Transmitter Version 2. It looks and works pretty much the same as the first version but the 2nd version features a clock and a thermometer built in as well.

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Quote: These headsets performed quite well during our battery of tests over the weeks that we tested them. Both the Maximo iMetal iP-HS1 & iP-HS2 headsets reproduced sound clearly and loudly. When using the iPod player, the iP-HS2 seemed to reproduce lower frequency better than the HS1's. Both headsets were able to stay in our ears for long periods of time listening to music before our ears showed signs of fatigue. Of course, the key for comfort when using the iP-HS2 Isolation Headset is choosing the right eartip size...

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With success in the OEM/ODM market Auras is now ready to move into the public spotlight with their name featured right on retail packages. Auras' headquarters is situated in Taipei, and with three factories in China it is clear that the company is off to a great start. Today we will be looking at the Auras TwinW, also known as the SMF660. This copper base, aluminum fin cooler places a single fan in the middle of two moderately sized cooling fin areas that utilize the push/pull effect of the fan. Let's dive in and see what the TwinW is all about.

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How many times have you misplaced your thumb drive and all you could think about was what information was saved on it. Was it personal? Was it sensitive to your job? Well Kingston has sent us one of their Data Traveler series thumb drives that is designed to help protect that data and not cost a bundle in the process. Today we look at the Data Traveler 400, read on to see if its a good fit for you.

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Earlier this week we previewed the Quadro FX1700, which is one of NVIDIA's mid-range workstation graphics cards that is based upon the G84GL core that in turn is derived from the consumer-class GeForce 8600 series. This PCI Express graphics card offers 512MB of video memory with two dual-link DVI connections and support for OpenGL 2.1 while maintaining a maximum power consumption of just 42 Watts. As we mentioned in the preview article, we would be looking at this graphics card's performance not only under Linux but also testing this workstation solution in both Microsoft Windows and Sun's Solaris. In this article today, we are doing just that as we test the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700 512MB with each of these operating systems and their respective binary display drivers.

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As the 9600GT cards continue to roll on in, we see lots of variants trying to stand out from the pack. The latest card to rock up in the labs is an offering from ECS that carries with it an Accelero S2 made by Artic Cooling. We've compared the ECS 9600GT against the Galaxy 9600GT which is slightly lower on the core and a fair bit lower on the shader clock. The Galaxy memory clock does come in a little higher though.

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AMD's new HD 3650 is basically an improved version of the 2600 XT without any major technological advances other than a smaller die size resulting in cheaper cards. PowerColor's HD 3650 Extreme comes equipped with 512 MB of fast GDDR3 memory and runs at higher clocks than the AMD reference design.

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Up on the block today is the GFXChilla VGA Cooler from Coolink and I've tested it with my ATI X1800GTO video card and with my two Nvidia 8600GTS video cards as well. I've got comparison results with the GFXChilla going up against names like Thermalright, Arctic Cooling, Aerocool and of course the stock coolers. One thing cool (pun intended) about the GFXChilla is that it is small and able to be used with my Nvidia cards in SLI. From my testing I've found that the GFXChiila is virtually silent and performs extremely well, especially if you consider just how small it is.

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Today we'll test the Krait mouse for RTS & MMORPG games. It's designed specially for the click'em all style. The brightest representative of such games is Diablo and its clones, which are not mentioned among the target applications for some reason. A description of this mouse focuses on the buttons, which can process many actions per second (up to 20) and are designed to be pressed as easy and fast as it's physically possible.

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The enclosure that I have for you today comes from Cooler Master and is the latest model that had been recently released (February 22nd). It's the highly anticipated Cosmos S featuring an updated look, better thermal solutions and plenty of more functionality. The biggest upgrade over the older Cosmos 1000 however is the aluminum design. Worth mentioning is the fact that while designing the Cosmos S, the Cooler Master team had been greatly inspired by the world's finest race cars. The effect is simply stunning, see for yourself.

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The latter of the aforementioned boards was one of first to hit the market at the launch of the P35 chipset. The GA-P35, in which ever format you got it, overclocked like a monster with a tweak here and a tweak there. But now that the world is on the energy saving kick Gigabyte has released an updated version of the P35 range called the GA-EP35 range. According to Gigabyte this new line of boards has a power saving rate of 70% which should make your parents, partner or roomy happy when it comes time to fork over the money to pay the utility bill. The Dynamic Energy Save or DES for short will automatically adjust CPU phase power during idle and load activity. Which means when at idle the power will drop down to dual phase and when a load is poured on up to four or higher dependent on the load.