Silverstone has managed to turn heads with the 90° turned motherboard tray. One of the cases, the Raven 2 has now been updated with a new hard drive tray system and USB 3.0. We take the chassis out during the night to see if we manage to scare it away or if it can hold its ground.
As technology advances necessarily some old designs and beliefs are left behind. Without any doubt in today’s highly competitive market only the companies who decide to adapt to the current user demands and needs will see their sales increasing. Apparently this is what PC Power & Cooling did with their new Silencer MK III PSUs in which the abandoned the non modular design and adopted a semi modular one.
OCZ's Synapse Caching SSD offers a unique way to achieve SSD-like performance for your big hard disk, which could be up to 3 TB in size. In our testing we see a performance improvement of 250% when compared to a SATA 6 Gbps HDD alone.
Antec aims to deliver a functional, good looking chassis at an interesting price point with the P280. As part of the Performance One line-up, you can expect the ability to fill the chassis with high-end components like an XL-ATX motherboard and long graphics cards. But will the chassis break a sweat doing so or keep on performing?
The NZXT Source 220 aims to deliver cool looks, capable interior, USB 3.0 - all at a really affordable price point. The Source series of cases aims to take on the budget market, but still offers the distinct NZXT looks we have come to expect. How does it turn out?
The Superior SH14 drive from ADATA offers two fairly unique attributes: shock resistance and water resistance. We take the drive for a spin and torture it to see if we can break it.
anidées is a new brand in the tough case market. Their first chassis - the AI6 aims to deliver the utmost quality with a solid choice of features. All this at a sub 100 Euro price point. We were impressed by the quality of materials used and also the attention to detail.
The latest chassis from BitFenix aims to offer "relentless performance". It offers a cool looking design, three retail Spectre cooling fans connected to a fan controller and a whooping four USB 3.0 ports. But will the Raider manage to flex its muscles and withstand our bombardment or will it fail to defend itself?
The Carbide 500R is the high-performance version of the 400R with additional cooling and an edgier design. Will these be enough to justify the higher price tag and will it leave us as impressed as with the more affordable brethren?
PowerColor's HD 6970 Devil 13 is a brand-new premium class Radeon HD 6970 which comes with the highest clocks available on any HD 6970 card. The Devil 13 also includes voltage monitoring points for voltmodders and a high quality power conversion system. But is that enough to justify a price of $549?
Biostar is back in our test station, this time with a stylish and affordable AMD 990FX solution, the TA990FXE. Straight out of their "Extreme Edition" product line, the TA990FXE is for discerning gamers on a budget, who want top-level performance. Is it truly "Extreme"? We take a look.
The CM Storm Trooper aims to take the gaming crowd by storm and position itself as the elite chassis for LAN Party goers, as it offers a long list of unique and useful features. We take the chassis hostage and stuff it full of hardware to see if it buckles or manages to strike back like a trooper.
While USB 3.0 equipped external hard drives are a dime a dozen, the Verbatim Store'n'Go for Mac adds Firewire 800 to the mix. This makes the external drive rather unique and offers a noticeable price advantage when compared to the likes of LaCie or Freecom variants.
Thermaltake's initial release of the Level 10 was co-designed with luxury car manufacturer BMW. The second iteration is a boiled down and condensed version that maximizes all the enthusiast wants while reducing the price considerably. The Level 10 GT just might be the best gaming case on the market.
Seasonic entered the Platinum party late since they wanted to make a big and well planned entrance. After many rumors, spy photos and lots of unconfirmed data Seasonic's Platinum series is finally released and is ready to fight for the crown. The stronger of the two fresh units, the Platinum-1000W, will be the test subject of today's review.
Stuffed with some cool features, like the hot-swap bay in the front, or the Air Penetrator fan in the top, the Precision PS06 offers many aspects while staying under that oh so important 100 USD barrier. We take the spacey looking chassis for a spin and test the usability of its long list of features.
The first PSU line that NZXT released is HALE90 which consists of five members. All feature 80 PLUS Gold efficiency, modular design, have a single +12V rail and the 140 mm fan they are equipped with is really quiet even at high loads/ambient. Today we will test the HALE90 850W which is the second strongest unit of the series and see if besides looks it offers good performance too.
After the Viako ML-55, we now get to take a look at one of the larger mini-ITX cases by the name "ML-Style". While it is bigger, it also allows for installation of a 3.5 inch drive along with a cool, slot-loading slimline DVD or Blu-Ray. We pull the case apart, stuff it with hardware and close it down to see if it can contain everything or burst at the seams.
OCZ's new ZT series fills a gap between the ZX and ZS series. The ZT units feature a fully modular cabling design, 80 PLUS Bronze efficiency, five year warranty and an affordable price for what they have to offer, so the deal sounds sweet. But before we jump into early conclusions let's first see if the OCZ ZT 750W will manage to impress with its performance, too.
Spire packs the Sentor 6004 with six LED equipped fans and offers an extended chassis to allow for large graphics cards to be installed. We pull the chassis apart and fill it with with hardware to see if it manages to impress with its understated, timeless looks or if these are signs of weakness.
Recently Thermaltake has added three new models to the Toughpower series, which are intended for power hungry systems with triple or even four-way SLI or Crossfire configurations. Today our load testers will have some extra work to do since we are going to test a monstrous Toughpower unit with 1500W capacity.
Intel's 320 Series SSD has been on the market for a while now. Recently the drives were plagued by a series of failures which caused the drive to report as 8 MB. A recent Intel firmware update adresses this issue. The installed the new firmware and gave the drive a spin.
Soungraph is the company behind all the great functionality of the major brand HTPC cases found on the market. With their retail products the company enables users to morph their normal cases and employ these as home theater system. We take a look at their first designed HTPC chassis called the Hummin' 3.03 and the first ever wireless USB based touch screen monitor.
The PC-V600F takes the successful V1020 series and shrinks it down for the mATX crowd. We will take the case for a spin to make sure it did not lose any of the important features on the way and to see if the chassis is really worth more than 200 bucks.
Strictly power is Antec's primary slogan for the new members of their Basiq PSU series, the VPx50P units. As it seems only three things were the main concerns during the design/manufacturing of these PSUs: quality, performance and high price/performance ratio.
