Monday Reviews

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Honeywell produces many different types of products in the consumer and enterprise market. It was just some time ago that SOYO partnered with Honeywell to produce a new line of consumer electronics and out of that agreement comes the newest LCD monitor from Honeywell: The ARIUS 22" HWLM2216. ASE Labs is proud to be the first site to review this monitor.

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It has been almost five years since I reviewed a Corsair product. In that time, ASE Labs and the industry have evolved. Five years ago it was DDR that was the memory of choice and DDR2 wasn't even on enthusiast's tongues. Fast forward to 2008 and we've got DDR3 just coming on the market. DDR2 is still alive and is the king of value right now. Corsair's 4GB XMS2 PC2-6400 kit is the subject for review.

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Remember that the Tracer series from Crucial is very mature. I even reviewed the original set of black modules last year. These new red modules mark a trend in computing that Crucial is good to follow. The fact of the matter is that people like personalization. I'm guilty of that myself. I know that these modules are hardly better than the normal Ballistix breed, but the fact that it is red and has lights adds something of value to people. Red is my favorite color and I would naturally gravitate to these in a computer I would build.

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Even though my previous reviews on Kingston Technology products were about their flash division, Kingston still is very much an enthusiast RAM company. Their HyperX series now comes in DDR3 at very high speeds. While DDR3 is still very new, Kingston offers a kit that runs at a scathing PC3-14400 which is 1800MHz DDR. The KHX14400D3K2 is on the bench for review.

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OCZ Technology has certainly had an impressive array of USB flash drives over the past few years, but they haven't stopped there. OCZ is continuing to revise their flash drive series and their most recently example of that is the Rally 2 Turbo. We found the original OCZ Rally to be fast, but the Rally 2 Turbo claims to take data transferring to incredible new heights with its latest dual-channel technology offering up to 35MB/s reads and 30MB/s writes. Like the original Rally, the Rally 2 Turbo is encased inside an aluminum chassis and comes with a lifetime warranty.

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We have taken a look at a lot of LCD monitors here at ThinkComputers. While most of them are adequate for all scenarios, none of them have been dubbed as gaming monitors. Well the ASUS PG221 is dubbed as a gaming monitor and we can see why just by looking at the specs, a 2000:1 contrasts ratio, 2ms response time, and all the connections you want on a LCD. Not only does it have these features it also has a 15W bass speaker, built-in webcam, touch-sensitive controls, and a cool lighting effect. It seems the PG221 has everything any gamer or consumer alike would want. Let's see if we can find anything wrong with it.

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Tuniq, a leader in CPU cooling has sent us over a HDD cooler that will do both of the above mentioned solutions. Tuniq is showing they are more than CPU cooling. The Sanctum is a full enclosure cooler that intends to cool down that ultra fast hard drive of yours. The cool thing about the Sanctum is that it is a passive cooler so it won't add to the noise of the hard drive it is trying to cool. But is it enough to warrant paying $22 from Newegg? Lets check it out.

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With only a few warts, the positives outweigh the negatives. I love the look and solid feel of the case and the cooling performance is actually quite good and silent. The quick disconnect fan is a very innovative idea that I wouldn't mind seeing used in other cases. The tool less feature in the case, 5.25 bays, are really easy to use and hold the hardware solidly in place. While a purely personal opinion, I think the case has a clean and elegant look to it that would fit in any office or room. In the end Silverstone has a solid case, but could use a boost in a few areas.

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ATI partners have brought their HD3870X2 products to their market for quite some time now, we compared the performance of samples from Jetway and HIS, unfortunately the results are not as encouraging, CrossFire can be a blessing or a curse depending on the games used. If you wonder what the other sides of the medallion looks like... keep on reading.

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Intels fastest dual core CPU is the 45 nm Core 2 Duo E8500 which is clocked at 3,16 GHz using a multiplier of 9.5. This microprocessor is a very good choice for gamers and we compared its performance to eleven other dual and quad core CPUs.

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Well here I am again finding myself locked in the iBuyPower bunker with more graphics cards than I can poke a stick at. Alongside three 9800 GTX graphics cards we also have two 9800 GX2s all ready to go into the funky water cooled system that we've been provided with today. With Tri SLI drivers in hand, more benchmarks than we had last time and some Dominos Pizza and Dickens Energy Cider, we're ready to get stuck into the wonderful world of expensive VGA setups which is overkill for most of us, but still wanted oh so badly.

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The Seagate FreeAgent Pro is among many other current external hard drives. Its sleek design will help keep your desktop clutter free. Available in 320GB, 500GB, 750GB, and 1000GB capacities and supporting USB, eSATA, and dual FireWire 400 there is quite a number of drives to choose from for your liking. The touch sensitive power points and included AutoBackup software help the FreeAgent Pro stick out from the crowd of other devices. Let's take a further look at this external hard drive.

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It's been a while since we've seen anything from Albatron. That's about to change though, as today we have with us the 9600GT. The thing that's particularly exciting about the Albatron 9600GT is that it really follows nothing but the reference design, including the core and memory clock. Why would we be excited about this? - The thing is, we've looked at so many 9600GT cards since launch and every single model has carried with it an overclock. We're not complaining, but we haven't actually had a chance to look at the 9600GT in its stock form, and it will really be interesting to see how it fairs.

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Earlier this month we took a look at the NVIDIA Quadro FX1700, which is one of NVIDIA's mid-range workstation graphics cards that boasts 512MB of video memory, support for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), OpenGL 2.1, and the power consumption for this PCI Express graphics card is less than 50 Watts. In the tests that followed, the FX1700 had performed quite well at the workstation-oriented SPECViewPerf benchmark and we had compared its Ubuntu Linux performance to Solaris Express and Microsoft Windows Vista. The NVIDIA Linux driver with the FX1700 had the best performance and it ended up being a nice graphics card for around $500 USD. Today we are looking at the NVIDIA Linux workstation performance once again but this time it's on the mobile front with the Quadro NVS 140M, which can be found in a number of business notebooks including the Lenovo ThinkPad T61.

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Intel originally planned for the X38 chipset to be the big kahuna for the Core 2 platform, but unfortunately its extremely poor overclocking, heat generation and lack of support for the 1600MHz FSB made Intel go back and bring up a new chipset. X48 however is not actually a new chipset, rather a hand picked X38 silicon that works at higher FSB clock speeds along with a lower voltage draw than that of the X38. But this also means it carries a premium with it, thus Intel decided to give it X48 naming. To date we have already tested the MSI X48 Platinum motherboard based on the new DDR3 version of the X48 chipset, and today we have our second DDR3 supporting X48 from ASUS. We used this same board in our DES Vs. EPU article, that being the P5E3 Premium WiFi. How well does it stack up? Let's take it for a spin and see.

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At the heart of our Palit GeForce 8800 GTS 1GB Sonic graphics card is the G92 core clocked at 730 MHz which is a generous step up from the 650MHz that comes on most GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB cards. Not only does our card have double the memory, it's clocked higher than the standard 512MB cards as well, coming in at 2100MHz versus 1940MHz for the standard card. After a bit of testing different speeds we overclocked our cards up to 760MHz core, and 2250MHz memory clock frequencies. While this isn't a huge increase it is still an impressive 30MHz core and 150MHz memory increase over an already substantial overclock...

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Case lighting has definitely come a long way. In the early days, any and all case lighting involved a drill, soldering iron, some knowledge of electronics, and an attempt to find something that would work in a case that was originally beige. Today, it is pretty hard to find something new and unique, nearly everything one could imagine has already been done, but the guys at CoolJagUSA have come up with a really cool item, programmable LED marquee fans. Program a message to be displayed on your case fan.

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Barriers are meant to be broken. As capacities have increased and prices fallen, each company wants those bragging rights of having the biggest, or at least the fastest. We put three 1TB hard drives through the paces - Hitachi's Deskstar 7K1000 and Seagate's Barracuda 7200.11 (ST3100340AS) as well as their Barracuda ES.2 (ST31000340NS). Which one will come out on top?

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While the 9800 series of cards from NVIDIA might be the talk of the town at the moment, there's no denying that the 9600GT is more in line with most people's budgets when it comes to buying a graphics card. The latest 9600GT to make its way into the labs comes in the form of a Foxconn which manages to carry quite a hefty overclock on its stock cooler. We've seen a lot of 9600GTs come through, and most have managed to show us something that has impressed us.

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Sennheiser creates some of the best audiophile headphones you can buy, but they also manufacture professional headsets for the aviation industry that feature an active noise-canceling technology dubbed NoiseGard. Today we'll take a look at a pair of their high-end consumer headphones, the PXC 450, that includes the same NoiseGard technology as used in some of the professional aviation models.

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Quote: Configuring the Patriot Viper Series 2GB PC3-12800 DDR3 memory kit was extremely easy, which made getting up and running at over 1600MHz and 7-7-7-18 timings even more enjoyable. It usually takes some tweaking to get the test system stable at such elevated frequencies, but this kit was pretty much plug and play.