Wed Reviews

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Western Digital is well known to system builders and end users for providing excellent storage solutions matched with a good warranty and support. I only recommend two hard drive manufactures to people, Western Digital is one of them (the other being Seagate). The latest and greatest things in terms of technology have moved out of the computer case and into portable storage. The My Passport Studio comes in at 250GB and this one is preformatted for Mac. Don't let that scare you, though.

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I have always been a bit weary of doing reviews of things very subjective and a Bluetooth headset is just one of those things. When Lubix offered to send a review sample over, I was hesitant until they insisted. I'm glad they did since the UBHS-NC1 is a great stereo headset. I'm not a headset kind of person, but as standard Bluetooth headphones, they rock.

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While the next generation of graphics cards from ATI are just around the corner, you can get some amazing performance with full open source support for a great price. Some of the readers might also be looking for a silent solution while having good performance and the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate steps up to provide that. It combines a truly massive heatsink with the powerful 3870 GPU to create a fast and completely silent graphics card for your quiet PC.

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I've always been keen to recommend Crucial in the past when people wanted RAM with a lifetime warranty that works as expected. Not until a few years ago did Crucial start offering their Ballistix overclocking RAM. Fast forward to the new DDR3 days of today and we find a new Ballistix PC3-16000 kit that offers speeds of 2000MHz! You'll be pressed to find a board that can even handle this speed, I know I didn't have one.

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Intel Core 2 Extreme CPU got a special treatment from the Intel thermal management department; a fancy large CPU cooler with 110cm LED fan and copper heat column. How does it compare to the other Intel reference coolers? Is it an alternative for 3rd party heatsinks, let us find out!

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DirectX is a programming interface that allows programs (like games) to talk with your PC hardware (like your video card). There are several DirectX versions available and in this short tutorial we will explain what the main differences between them are.

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ASRock has placed the nForce 780a SLI on their flagship AM2+ board, the K10N780SLIX3-Wifi, only one of a small handful of nForce 780a SLI boards on the market. Actually, this one is not yet for sale in the states. A quick glance at this board will tell you it isn't the typical ASRock motherboard with some features you might expect from Asus, Gigabyte, or the like. Today, I will be looking at the K10N780SLIX3-Wifi. Will nVidia's geForce Boost, an onboard GPU working in conjunction with the PCI-E video card(s) prove to be a true innovation, or will it be the let-down that the naysayers predict? Will the K10N780SLIX3-Wifi move ASRock from the ranks of the econo-board to the big boys? Stay tuned to see!

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Welcome to another session of void-your-warranty, as today we will look at upgrading the stock heat spreaders on a pair of Kingston DDR2 memory modules. What we will do here is run through a step-by-step of removing the plain flat aluminum spreaders that come with most RAM modules and upgrading them with some Nexus HXR-550B Heat-Pipe memory coolers.

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* *The HD4850 is a product which is aimed straight for the throat of Nvidia's 9800GTX and has actually incited a quick and dramatic response from the boys in green. After the initial performance reports of this card were released, Nvidia quickly knocked nearly $100 off the MSRP of their then $300 GTX so it could compete mono a mono with ATI's new wunderkind. Not only is the HD4850 seemingly perfectly suited for budget-minded gamers in the $200 price bracket, but it also offers a bevy of other features including audio out through HDMI as well as Havok physics support. The more features the better we say.*

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Mmm, Mac hardware. Sharp. Purposeful. Tasty. Downright industrial designelicious. Half of the people who make the vaunted switch do so because of this keyboard. I mean, not literally this keyboard, but because of the engineering and style that this wireless device is the apex embodiment of. The keyboard is small because it's cut down; the keys are standard but a lot is sacrificed to make the whole package as miniscule as possible without cramping digits. I see a lot of potential in this input device, and not because it's portable. But I also can't help but wonder, can design be taken too far?

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AMD was busy last month with the launch of the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 graphics cards, which have both proved themselves to be price versus performance winners. This month, AMD is starting off by launching three new processors: the Phenom X4 9950 processor and the energy-efficient Phenom X4 9350e and 9150e processors. Read on to see how these new processors do!

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Back in March we had looked at the Intel Core 2 Duo T9300 mobile processor with its Penryn core and 6MB of shared L2 cache between its two cores clocked at 2.50GHz. We were very pleased with the performance of this mobile processor on Linux, which was found within a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 notebook, and today we are looking at the Penryn's desktop counterpart. Intel's Core 2 Duo Wolfdale E8000 series processors were released earlier this year with 6MB of L2 cache, 45nm manufacturing, a 1333MHz FSB, and support for SSE 4.1. The processor from the Wolfdale series we are looking at today under Linux is the Core 2 Duo E8400.

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Shoppers today are faced with many options when choosing where to store their valuable data: from traditional optical media and hard drive based storage, to flash drives and even more exotic third party online storage - each with its own advantages and disadvantages. In this article Benchmark Reviews will look at one such option that's recently emerged in the storage market; the network-attached storage (NAS), in the form of the QNAP TS-209 Pro Gigabit SATA NAS. The NAS has lately gained popularity as more and more consumers realize the need for a reliable, cost effective, and easy to access centralized way to store their data.However, with so many competing products it's not always possible for buyers to easily compare what's on the market. Read on as Benchmark Reviews puts this all-in-one NAS through its paces.

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QUOTE: Samsung is one of the largest memory suppliers in the world, so it is natural to find them playing in the Solid-State Drive (SSD) market. Their latest offering, the MCBQE32G5MPP-0VA00 is a 2.5-inch 32GB drive with big potential and a new low price tag. From the get go we were told to expect MTRON MOBI performance at a 15% reduced cost.

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Put simply, Corsair's TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF is a great kit. The DHX cooling system is still the best I've seen to date, cooling both a specially designed PCB and the ICs themselves. BGA based DDR2 modules conduct quite a bit of heat back into the PCB, so this is a very intelligent design that will likely prolong the life of just about any IC under the hood. Corsair's included

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This time we will show you a graphics card that has evolved to be something more than its forefathers. Sure, the pixel pushing ability is still there and benchmarks will show that clearly but what more can a graphics card do? Up till now, nothing much but this is about to change...

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AMD's new Radeon HD 4870 is the first graphics card to feature GDDR5 memory. GDDR5 offers twice the memory bandwidth over previous GDDR generations which helps the HD 4870 gain a nice performance advantage over the HD 4850.

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We have seen many cases here at XSReviews ranging from the conservative silent types to the somewhat more extravagant. When looking for cases many people want to have the best of both worlds: silence and looks. Yet although there are solutions available for such a customer, many fall short of delivering a truly silent gaming case. With this in mind and the hope of filling this gap, Zalman have crafted the GS1000 -- a quiet case that looks to have been designed with gaming in mind.