Monday Reviews

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While Logitech is a company that graces ASE Labs' test bench often, it is not often that we get to see a highly targeted type of keyboard combo. The Logitech Wave Pro Desktop is targeted to the consumer market unlike their G series products. Don't let that fool you. This combo has some good (and not so good) features that set it apart from its gaming brethren.

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When readers come to ASE Labs and see a graphics card review, they expect to find a high speed entry with a bunch of bells and whistles. There is another section of the market that ASE Labs reaches and that is the mainstream builders and entertainment PC builders. These types of buyers have very different requirements than the so-called enthusiast. Speed and performance take a back seat to form factor, noise, and features. Most small cases only support low profile cards and the Sapphire Radeon HD 3450 steps in to provide the video on your entertainment system.

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External hard drive storage is the technology that people are using to keep their data backed up in multiple locations in the current era of technology. There are good products and bad ones just the same but not all enclosures promise the same thing. The Thermaltake BlacX was probably the first unit to take a hard drive and turn it into the removable storage. Now you can easily keep multiple physical backups with ease using this product. Pretty interesting.

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ATP Electronics is a 17 year-old company best known for their EarthDrive recyclable USB flash drive, which is not only made of recycled materials but also has part of the proceeds go towards rainforest protection. They also make memory products for both enterprise and home applications in addition to various types of removable storage. Today, ASE Labs has the ATP ToughDrive 4GB Camo edition.

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Quote: The kit in question features two 1GB sticks of PC3-14400 (1800MHz) DDR3 memory rated for 8-8-8-24 timings at 1.9V. While slower kits showed that they could be overclocked to perform nearly as well as this Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR3-1800 dual channel memory kit, if you are looking for plug and play performance at 1800MHz (and above), this kit is worth considering.

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Quote: The Mapower MAP-TB32 dual SATA RAID enclosure is a very well constructed enclosure with a clean and appealing appearance. This enclosure's primary method of connection should be via eSATA to take full advantage of its capabilities, as its below average USB 2.0 performance is disappointing. Minor issues and poor documentation aside, performance on the SATA bus is good and gets even better when configured to operate as a RAID-0 volume.

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Quote: The Thecus N3200 3-Bay SOHO network storage system is much more than a typical network attached storage device, and is something like a Swiss Army knife of networking and storage functionality. In addition to making sure your important data is well looked after on three hard drives configured in your choice of RAID arrays, it makes sharing it locally and globally rather easy.

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Quote: The Radeon HD4850 chipset was launched to fill a role in the middle of the graphics card market. The Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD4850 512MB graphics card stands out in this crowd of 'average' cards by offering a factory overclocked GPU and memory, as well as a cooling upgrade that keeps it cool and quiet.

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Quote: Before the review started I didn't know what to expect from for the Rosewill RX630-S-B Xtreme Series 630W power supply. The published features and specifications were strong, and from what I had read elsewhere on the web the general opinion seemed positive. I just wasn't sure that a Rosewill power supply priced under $90 was really going to impress, and I worried that too much of that small budget had been spent on the aesthetics.

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Quote: Here is the scoop. I am going to sell off some of Bigbruin.com's review items at low prices, and half of the money is going to go to a charity working on a cure for the disease that hit me last year (Severe Aplastic Anemia). The terms are that I am going to give 50% off all sales to the charity. I will keep adding things to this thread and will cut a check when the sale seems to be over. Shipping is calculated separately and not included in the 50/50 split. People can pay via money order, check, or Paypal, and I will eat the Paypal fees. And if helping a charity and getting a good deal weren't enough, one person who buys something from the yard sale will be randomly selected to receive a $25 Best Buy gift card.

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Quote: The BFG Tech line of power supplies consists of several models that offer a variety of interesting features and power ratings from 550W to 1000W. In this review we will be taking a look at the LS-680, a 680 Watt unit that features desirable items such as quad 12V rails, four PCI Express graphics card connections, and a typical efficiency of 85%.

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Quote: The bottom line on the Jazz Elite HDV-188 5MP HD video camera is that it is a cool little gadget that is fun to use. It takes good photos and makes decent videos, but the conditions seem to have to be just right. It required a bit of experimentation to master the settings and to learn the limitations of the device, but I am generally happy with it.

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One such company is Liteon, they've got a line of portable optical DVDRW drives called the EZ-DUB. These drives feature a standard sized, fully featured, optical drive inside of an external enclosure, but what makes these special is the addition of two touch sensitive buttons labeled 'File and 'Dub' to make common functions easily accessible to the end user. Is the EZ-DUB worth your money, are the extra features worth it?

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Now here's the thing - I have a beautiful Antec Nine Hundred case with a single DVD drive installed in one of the 5.25' external drive bays, so the other bays remain largely unused. I've considered putting in additional optical drives, but tell you the truth, I personally just don't have any great need to do so. For looks alone I've been considering installing a fan controller or something fun with lights and gauges, but just never saw anything that I couldn't live without. Fortunately for me, ICY DOCK came along with an intriguing new product and I was given the opportunity to check it out. Not only does the ICY DOCK MB672SKGF internal 3.5' SAS/SATA HDD Enclosure look great, but it actually solves a problem I never realized I had. Now with one drive bay easily accessible in the front of my Nine Hundred case, I can easily swap out hard drives and forget about those external drives and the plethora of cables and power supplies that come with them. Let's take a closer look at ! ICY DOCK and the new internal drive enclosure from this innovative company.

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In the Phoronix Test Suite 1.2 Malvik release our flagship Linux benchmarking software was brought to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD. With Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Orkdal, to be officially released later this year, we are now extending our test support to include Apple's Mac OS X operating system. In Phoronix Test Suite 1.4 Alpha 2 that was released this morning there is full support for Mac OS X within this open-source benchmarking framework and there are about three dozen tests that will run out of the box in this environment. We believe this is now the most comprehensive benchmarking platform for Mac OS X and it allows real-world test results to be compared from Linux, OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD.

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A-DATA's 4 GB Vitesta Extreme Edition DDR2 memory kit offers great performance at a low price of only $75. The memory can even run CL3 at the specified 800 MHz, with a small voltage increase and scales up to DDR2-1066 at CL5.

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Quote: In terms of single GPU performance, the Radeon HD4870 set the bar pretty high, and the Sapphire Toxic Radeon HD4870 512MB graphics card had its work cut out for it to do much better. With a factory overclock of 30MHz on the GPU and 100MHz on the memory, the Toxic version generally did perform better, but not always by much.

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* Sans Digital, a well-known contender in the storage market, recently introduced a new storage device which combines the features of configurable RAID with the convenience of USB and eSATA. The MobileSTOR MS2UT+B dual bay enclosure accepts two hard drives up to 1 TB in size. It can then mirror or stripe the drives, or use what Sans Digital calls SAFE33 or SAFE50. ThinkComputers takes a look.

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The ProWater 850i has a lot going for it. Performance is good, setup is easy, and all required parts are included along with a generous helping of accessories. The kit succeeded in keeping an AMD 5000+ Black Edition CPU cool during stress testing without all the noise associated with air cooling. As an added bonus, the tubing is UV reactive so it will look cool in a windowed case with UV lighting.

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Logitech knows a thing or two about being successful and they have injected this knowledge into their business model. They know that you have to supply a steady stream of new and innovative products to keep customers coming back. They are also well aware that you need a wide range of products, from high end gear all the way down to items that will fit any budget. It is with this mindset that Logitech released the Cordless Desktop S520 last month, the latest addition to their keyboard + mice combos that checks in at a very attractive price point.

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The low to mid-range market has been heating up over the past few months; NVIDIA released the 9500 GT which I personally felt was a massive disappointment due to the price to performance ratio when compared to the 9600 GSO. ATI / AMD hasn't been asleep, though. The HD 4670 came out and has really managed to impress. The HD 4650 is also supposed to be out, but for some reason it hasn't really shown up on the market. Adding to the HD 4000 series, however, is a new low-end entry level model; the HD 4550.

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* Thermaltake never rests. They are constantly making new products, updating old products and trying to get into the home of every computer user in North America. The VI-ON is one of their latest enclosures and coupled with the popular eSATA and USB2.0 interfaces, you don't have to sacrifice speed over connectivity anymore. If you've got an eSATA capable machine, performance of an external Hard Drive almost mirrors internal connected speeds, but if you've got an older computer without eSATA or want to connect the VI-ON to your laptop, you're set with the USB2.0 interface.

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Much like NorthQ's Black Magic powersupply I previously looked at, the ST-850P-AF also features a 135mm cooling fan. The biggest different between these two units aside from individual components is that the ST-850P-AF does not feature modular connectivity. Will the stability of the ST-850P-AF prove that the unit should be carried in more U.S. retailers such as NewEgg? Or will the powersupply not quite live up to my expectations?

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Palit is one of the first AMD board partners to release a custom Radeon HD 4870 version. Their new HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition comes with a completely revamped cooling assembly that features two fans to keep the card cool. Also included is a DisplayPort connector and a Turbo switch which lets you select the operating frequencies of the card. The mandatory overclocked out of the box is included as well.

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Even for the home user, if 'in today's networked world, digital content is truly the most precious asset', then perhaps protecting that content and providing easy access to that content is second on the list. The Thecus N3200 is a Networked Attached Storage (NAS) device that proposes to do just that by providing complete data redundancy using RAID 5. Or as Thecus puts it, 'RAID 5 Comes Home'.

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Antec has been on the forefront of quality case design for some time. While not always the flashiest of cases, Antec's build quality and functionally generally ranks toward the top of the charts. However, recently Antec has made a momentum shift, and produced a product line to appeal to gamers and enthusiast system builders alike. Enter the Antec Twelve Hundred Case, that in Antec's own words:

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The name Lian Li is synonymous with quality computer cases and computer accessories. They've been in the business for over 20 years and have attained ISO 9001 certification for all of their products. They've built some reputation over the years and have received accolades from the computer industry as well as end users; but nobody is perfect. Today Benchmark Reviews will take a look at the Lian Li PC7B Plus II black aluminum mid-tower computer case and see if this reputation for quality and performance still holds true, after all these years.

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Over the years SilverStone has designed some astonishing ATX computer cases such as the Temjin TJ10 and the Sugo, but they haven't stopped with cases. SilverStone has introduced high-performance power supplies such as the Decathlon 800W and they have also been making disk drive enclosures such as the MS05, which is an eSATA-based enclosure. SilverStone though has introduced a new 2.5-inch disk enclosure that combines a normal USB to SATA adapter with RFID encryption technologies. If the included RFID sensor keys aren't close enough to this enclosure, the user cannot access any data off the disk as it's all encrypted. However, does the SilverStone Treasure TS01 work under Linux? We'll tell you today.

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Over the years we have seen the 7000, 8000 and the now current 9000 series. What we are going to review today is not the beginning of the 1xxxx series but a miniature 9xxx called the CNPS9300AT. The little brother boasts some numbers that are more impressive than the bigger brother. Smaller but faster fan. And on load a little louder. Now that we got the numbers out of the way time to see how this little booger does on the test bench.

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* Most performance mice, which gamers tend to use, are normally manufactured by one of two companies: Logitech or Razer. Both these companies are widely known in the gaming industry. However, many more manufacturers, such as Genius, are making their show in the performance gaming mouse market. The contender we have for review today is the Genius Ergo 555 Laser, a 'Professional laser gaming mouse with OLED graphics effect'. Let's see how it performs.

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Quote: Is the Twelve Hundred the Unbeatable Gaming Case that Antec says it is? Well, it has all the good things and corrected most, if not all, of the flaws of the Nine Hundred. If you liked the Nine Hundred, you will love the Twelve Hundred. As for the rest of us who have not been face to face with a Nine Hundred, the Twelve Hundred has a lot of nice style to it and it is very easy to work with and in. It also lends itself to be more user tailored than any other case I have used in a long while...