Wed Reviews

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Thermaltake makes an entire range of PC supplies including cases, cooling, hardware and much more. The last Thermaltake product I reviewed was the excellent Armor full tower case. Thermaltake is known for making great cases and the M9 looks like a mid tower case with ventilation as its prime agenda. Should the Antec Nine Hundred be worried? Perhaps...

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Antec steps up to the plate to deliver a brand new case in the "Hundred" series. Betting on the success of the excellent Nine Hundred, Antec has released a lower end model dubbed, the Three Hundred. Known as the " Versatile Case," will the new case stand out from its bigger, badder brother? Probably not, but it is at a better price point that its sibling.

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It has been a very long time since a graphics card has passed by the review bench of ASE Labs. Sapphire steps up to the plate with their release of the Radeon HD3870 Toxic Edition that hopes to earn some of your hard earned cash. With AMD's support of open source, the ATI partners are in a good position to conqueror the Linux market and the future to bright. Sapphire is the biggest producer of ATI cards and we will see how their product performs.

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ASE Labs has always explained the benefits of having redundant storage and backups. There are series of articles devoted to each technology. Sans Digital is a big player in RAID enclosures and their latest model, the MobileSTOR MS2UTN+ delivers USB2 and eSATA support to a 2 disk array of your choosing. This combines the best of both world for data backup and redundancy. It really is an excellent product.

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nVidia been on Intel\'s case by very strongly voicing their opinions on how a better GPU adds more value that a better CPU. This could be true for certain things on a low to medium end setup but for enthusiast gamers, the fastest of the fastest is the only option. We put this theory to test by putting three nVidia 9800GTX cards in Triple SLI mode and running some games on the highest-end Intel and AMD CPUs, the Core 2 Extreme QX9770 and Phenom X4 9850 respectively.

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With GPU's raising the bar in terms of performance and heat output with every generation, aftermarket cooling is taking a larger role in today's high performance gaming systems. Today we take a look at Thermaltake's DuOrb CL-G0102. Does the DuOrb have the performance to match the good looks, or is this another case of Ms. Teen USA South Carolina? Read more to find out!

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Chaintech have really expanded from the line of graphics cards, now doing products like memory and flash products as well. What they no longer do however are motherboards. It wasn't all that long ago we were impressed with fancy cooling solutions and the general performance of Chaintech products. We'll have to see if the 9600GT is able to do anything for us. >From first glance the Chaintech offering didn't do a lot for us, but upon throwing it in our system we where pleasantly surprised with what happened. Before we get into that though, let's find out what they've done with the package and have a closer look at the actual card.

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* *At the end of the day, this is yet another very nice kit of memory from Aeneon. The performance was very good, the stability was excellent, and the MSRP is very competitive. Thanks to those 3 key features, the Aeneon XTune DDR3-1600 Mhz kit of memory has earned out Top Pick award.*

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A few months ago I reviewed the Aeneon Xtune DDR3-1333 2GB kit from Qimonda. It was an impressive pair of memory modules from a company we'd never heard of. The kit was very flexible, gaining tighter timings at lower clockrates, and overclocked reasonably well, all at the PC3 standard of 1.5v. Today I will be looking at Aeneon's latest PC3 kit, their DDR3-1600 2GB kit. It is rated at DDR3-1600, CL9, once again at the standard 1.5v. Will this new kit impress us as well as the earlier kit did? Continue reading to see.

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As a serious High-End product, the NH-U12P effectively combines charismatic appearance with advanced technical design. It's an impressive cooler indeed - its working medium comprises a copper heat sink (45x42x5 mm), four 6mm copper heat pipes, a stack of large aluminum fins, and a 1300rpm fan.

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* As the computing industry has evolved over the years, people have begun to care more and more about what their PC looks like, as well as how it performs. But it's not like what it was like several years ago, where the 'cool' happened to be flashing neon tubes and fans that glow various colours. The tacky disco era has moved on now, it's now the age of pure quality that performs well, is silent and ultimately, looks good. One of the products on the current market that boasts to do all this is the Asus Triton 79 Amazing. Now let's see how amazing this CPU cooler really is.

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Microsoft Live OneCare (or just OneCare) is Microsoft's answer to the mistake they made years ago that passed the responsibility for securing Windows off to third parties. That has, in my mind, been one of the three critical mistakes Microsoft has made since they first were founded. This created an environment where the people who secured the product were motivated to showcase the product's vulnerabilities in order to sell their wares while creating no incentive for them to actually help improve the core offering.

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The original Core 2 Duo based on Conroe architecture had 2MB of shared Level 2 cache. Whole Penryn based CPUs came with 6MB. This is a huge jump in size, but what about a cheaper option? Well, Intel has now come out with its latest addition to the Core 2 line; welcoming the Core 2 Duo E7000 series. This new CPU is designed to take a more mainstream and value-end stand. Its intention is to compliment and replace the already popular E4000 series of Core 2 CPUs. Today we will be testing out what the Core 2 Duo E7000 series is capable of and will pit it against its direct competition; AMD's Phenom X3.

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While we have been impressed with some of their earlier offerings, these folks have taken their power supplies to the next level by offering a power supply that they claim is not only top notch, but also has a new look that is more than a little interesting. They have done so under a subsidiary company ABS, a name that is aiming at taking Tagan reliability and offering more value. There is more to this package than just numbers, though. You also get a modular design that offers more cable security than most others on the market. The lighting is unique and even the colored rings surrounding your modular cables give off LED lighting.

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Quote: Booq calls the Boa A travel bag designed especially for frequently-traveling professionals. This bag has about 2,000 pockets and zippers to store all your favorite gear and gadgets. Actually, we counted 9 zippered pockets, 3 magnetic pockets, with 4 large compartments for your precious cargo. The outer material is made of water-repelling nylon that will keep the moisture out. Inside the Booq Boa, the laptop is housed in its own separate compartment that is lined with protective foam covered in very soft upholstery...

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The GeForce 9800GTX is a perfect example. While the name implies that it is an upgrade for the GeForce 8800GTX, which it in a way is, it also is just a higher clocked GeForce 8800GTS 512 MB. You might wonder why NVIDIA didn't just use GeForce 9 for all their G92 based cards but we may never know why.

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Corsair knows enthusiasts and the performance we demand from our components. Since 1994 the guys over in Fremont, California have met that demand by providing some of the highest quality memory in the market. Within the past couple of years, Corsair has also sailed into the power supply scene and carried over the quality and reliability their brand name is known for.

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Logitech really is covering all the bases with its peripherals these days. The last Logitech product I reviewed was the MX Air Mouse and I thought that was a nifty bit of kit to control your home theater setup. The proverbial cake however has not just been taken; it's been flaunted and eaten right in front of our starving faces. I'm referring to the Logitech Harmony One remote control here; a nifty slick piece of all-in-one cake that can control TVs, DVD players, VCRs, game consoles, home media center PCs, air conditioning units and pretty much everything else that uses an Infrared transmitting remote control.

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We've published a great deal of benchmarks looking at the Linux fglrx driver (now more commonly referred to as the Linux Catalyst driver) since these major changes were pushed into the limelight this past fall. In fact, since this past September we've published more than 80 display driver articles with many of them being AMD related, and that's in addition to nearly a dozen graphics card reviews. On the AMD side, all of our testing has been done with the consumer-grade Radeon GPUs and IGPs, but that has changed today. In this article, we are providing our first look at the AMD FireGL V8600 1GB under Linux. We'll share our thoughts on this high-end workstation graphics card and specifically looking at how the Windows and Linux performance compares.

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Home theater PC's have become very popular lately. It seems almost everyone I know has been taking their old computers and turning them into media machines. Well what if you want the best media machine money can buy? The Alienware Hangar18 HD Entertainment Center could be just that. Alienware is mainly known for making gaming machines, so it will be interesting to see how they do on the Hangar18. The Hangar18 is an all-in-one media machine that can play DVD's or Blu-ray media, watch live TV, watch internet TV, listen to music, and share it all wirelessly. Let's check it out!

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When we reviewed the tx2000's predecessor, aptly named the tx1000, last July, we found it to be an interesting machine. It was unique in being one of the only entertainment-minded laptops with a resistive digitizer display. HP has refreshed the tx1000 with the tx2000, which brings a technology refresh as well as a full active WACOM digitizer.

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As a conclusion of the 9800GX2 I have to say that it's a truely impressive piece of kit. I had my doubts about dual GPU systems, but in our tests the SLI worked nicely and gave a significant performance boost over single card setups.

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Big on performance and easy on the wallet, the Albatron GeForce 9600GT-512X video card offers unheard of graphics processing power at a wallet friendly price point. Finally you can enjoy decent frame rates in the latest DirectX 10 games at resolutions that gamers actually want to use. Read on as we take a look at the Albatron GeForce 9600GT-512X and how it does when we game on it and then overclock it to the max.

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I liken Lian-Li to the Mercedes-Benz of the chassis design world. The Taiwan-based company designs its chassis with sleek, conservative style and hand-builds cases out of lightweight, yet durable aluminum. The chassis are generally not flashy, but are very, very conducive for high-performance cooling while overclocking. Lian-Li recently renewed its V series line-up with five new cases: PC-V2110, PC-V2010, PC-V1110, PC-V1000Z, and the focus of this review, the PC-V1010. ThinkComputers goes inside the Lian-Li PC-V1010 chassis in this review.