Monday Reviews

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What happens when you need a full size case for a new build? Maybe you want the extra space for additional cooling or hardware support. Look no futher than the Thermaltake Armor VA8003BWS. We already know that Thermaltake is a big player in the cases and modding market. This case certainly fits its name. It is big, heavy, and tough.

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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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With games getting more and more demanding, the amount of frame buffer available to the GPU has been on a continuous rise. However, as we saw in the ASUS 8800GT-1GB article, it doesn't always help to equip your VGA card with more RAM than the reference design of a manufacturer. Today, we see MSI going down that road with their 1GB version of the 9600GT graphics card.

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Despite the fact that DDR3 has a slightly better performance and consumes less power compared to DDR2, it is still hard to recommend DDR3 unless you have a huge chunk of money to spend. For a far less price, one can purchase 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 instead of the more expensive 2GB (1X1GB) of DDR3. Not only is DDR3 so much more expensive compared to DDR2, in real-world, you would hardly see a major performance increase using DDR3. Of course, this could all change in the very near future as DDR3's price will drop with more motherboards on the pipeline supporting it and manufacturers ramping up the production. Until then, DDR2 is still a better choice to buy. That is why we are seeing many memory manufacturers still not giving up the DDR2 and releasing higher performance DDR2. A month or two ago, OCZ the released DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC 4GB Edition. This is one of the highest clock speed 4GB DDR2 that is available on the market. Today, join us as we put this memory to the test.

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Notebook mice are getting more and more popular. They offer 100% of the functionality of a standard mouse, but have it all packed into a smaller package. In addition, seeing that most laptop buyers are consumers that like to be unplugged and free to roam (hence why you buy a laptop), it is only common sense that a wireless mouse would make a smart purchase.

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Gigabyte was nice enough to send us two motherboards, one based on the P35 and the other the X38. We wanted to see how much better it really is over the P35 purely based on benchmarks and overclocking. Not to give the whole review away in the introduction, but I was really surprised with the GA-EX38-DS4 as it took our E8400 to a whole new level.

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Corsair is best known for its memory products-DIMMs and flash-but it has a solid line of power supply units, as well. The company sent ThinkComputers its TX750, a 750W unit with a single 60A 12V rail-powerful enough for a GeForce 8800 GTX. While non-modular, the cables are sleeved and have quick-release connectors. We tested this device with a five-year warranty-results within.

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ASUS has created a huge wave in the sub-notebook & portable Internet device markets with their Eee PC. Sub-notebooks are normally wonderfully exotic looking hardware for delightfully high prices. Well, exotic until one looks at the specs. The MacBook air is a great example - it looks like a killer machine until one looks at the combination of the lackluster specs and a price that makes even the most enthusiastic Mac fan blush. As for portable Internet devices, the Nokia N series is the first that comes to mind. Granted, they are really fantastic machines with excellent screens and software, but I am a bit old school I suppose. I still want a real keyboard. The Nokia N810 is close, but like my HTC TyTN, the keyboard is good for casual data entry and not suitable for long sessions of messaging, IRC or typing out documents or spreadsheets. The Nokia and other portable devices tend to also be pretty light on specifications, unless one is willing to pay the obscene price that OQO wants for their sub-sub-notebook.

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The Samsung CLP-610ND is an affordable option to the high end CLP-650 and a great replacement to the lifeless CLP-300. Priced at $150.00 more than the CLP-300, you won't be disappointed in what you pay for. First off, you get built in network capability. This is a must have for any business! The second and more important aspect of the CLP-610ND is the quality and speed of each print job. The self-calibration increases some print jobs but ensures you get top quality every time. At 21 pages per minute, you can have your report in your boss' hand in no time.

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Less than a week ago we pushed out the first public release of the Phoronix Test Suite. This GPLv3 Linux benchmarking software had received a great deal of interest, but v0.1 did have a few bugs and a number of uncompleted features. Yesterday though we pushed out version 0.2 of the Phoronix Test Suite with a number of improvements, new benchmarking profiles, and other changes. In addition to noting some of the improvements made in this release, there are also other Phoronix Test Suite highlights to share from this past week.

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If you've recently found yourself thinking that you might just bite the bullet and buy a new high-end graphics card, news last week that new models from NVIDIA could be coming as soon as July may make you rethink that decision. The day before the 9800GTX was officially unveiled, rumors started to leak that NVIDIA was already preparing a new line-up of high-end cards under the 9900 naming scheme, and that the 9800 series would be discontinued in July. With NVIDIA moving onto the CPU market in the near future, you have to wonder if the strategy will be the same when they continue to battle AMD and the even stronger Intel. If you really sit back and take a look at the big picture, you can see why consoles are so popular these days.

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In this review we take a closer look at the latest product from Gainward, based on the recently released 9800 GTX we compare the BLISS' performance in several games, and find out how cool and quiet this new high end video card is. Read on to learn more.

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If you're looking for a 9600GT, the chances are we can give you a pretty good idea of which one to get. We get a lot of samples, but the 9600GT would have to be one product that we've received over and over again from different companies who are mixing it up with big clocks and bigger coolers. The latest 9600GT to make its way into the labs is from ASUS and carries with it some stock clocks, but also has a mean looking cooler that we've seen before. We've been happy with the 9600GT ever since its interception, and it's managed to receive a number of awards. Let's see if ASUS can impress us with their incarnation of the card.

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* Over the last few years, a lot more attention has been paid to power supplies, and their ever important role of giving our prized possessions the juice they need to run as pain free as possible. However, not only have companies been tempting our wallets with excellent rail stability and high efficiencies, they've also touted the low noise levels of their units. The PSU I have with me today sports a large, slow spinning fan and with near silence being one of it's main features. I'll be interested to see how much it can actually reduce my rig's noise levels by.

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Nexus HXR-5500 Memory Heat pipe Cooler. A long name for such a simple product. But it's simplicity also makes it cheaper and I like the look of it as well. Again Nexus used Heat pipes to help cool down in this case the memory. The HXR-5500 is basically a large platter of aluminum stuck to the side of your memory along with a heat pipe to cool it more efficiently and therefore give it more over clocking capabilities.

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A new company to us here at Pro-Clockers is Eagle Tech. Browsing around their site we see they are active in cooling, speakers, power supplies and storage. Storage is why we are here today as Eagle Tech has sent us their ET-CSIU2J-BK JBOD External Storage Enclosure. This unit utilizes the JBOD standard and a very interesting front bezel. The enclosure houses two SATA drives and plugs into the PC via the USB port.

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Today I will be looking at the Asus P5K Pro, a DDR2 P35 board. Though the X38 boards have been out a while, and the X48 boards are finally hitting the market, the P35 chipset is still very popular, with its maturity and excellent performance. The P5K Pro is an economy-minded board, filling in the fairly sizable gap between the P5K Deluxe and the stripped down P5K SE. How will the P5K Pro size up against its big brother? Read on to see...

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Most HTPC users will find that there are only a limited number of CPU coolers available to use in most HTPC cases because of their smaller size. OrigenAE created the C10 to help fill that void. The C10 has three U-shaped copper heatpipes that come in direct contact with the CPU, and 35 aluminum fins behind a standard size 70mm fan.

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While there were whispers of the 8800GS in the background, it was never really one of those cards that got much attention. Everyone was too busy concentrating on the 8800GT and new 8800GTS 512MB card to really pay much attention to it. ASUS are only one of two companies in Australia who have an 8800GS on the market here. The only other company who chose to take up the card and release it locally was XFX. The card seems to be a bit of a weird model and we're not too sure where it will sit. The card should sit behind a 8800GT, but the 9600GT also sits just behind it. It's possible that both cards perform quite similar and companies chose to uptake the 9 series model over the ageing 8800 series.

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Helio is one of the few indie phone operators around, and the Mysto is the latest in its line of stylish, youth-oriented units. It is lightweight and multimedia friendly, but some will find it too focused on next-gen features and not friendly enough for day-to-day, mundane tasks like quick calls..

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At first glance this memory is very impressive and it's doesn't just stop at great looks. At PC3-10666 speeds the memory can generate a fair amount of heat. Thankfully the heatpipe/heatsink combo used works extremely well and it allows the modules to remain cool. Of course excellent case ventilation is required for it to work to its full potential.

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MSI laptops are becoming more popular with good reason, offering excellent performance at competitive prices. Their latest gaming laptop comes with retro style Turbo button which overclocks the CPU on the fly. Equipped with 8600M GT and 2Gb ram this multimedia power house aims to impress.

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Gateway has recently revamped its FX line of gaming desktops - internally at least. Though it looks the same as other older FX machines we've seen from Gateway, this one is easily the most powerful Gateway ever assembled, and even includes a factory-overclocked quad-core processor running at a steamy 3.66GHz. Though its performance is generally excellent, we think Gateway has pushed this machine's CPU a bit too much, as the BTX induction fan is way too loud and we were able to make it blue screen on cue. It's also puzzling to us why Gateway builds