Xigmatek is growing up and so are their cases. The company has made a name for themselves with their extensive entry- and mid-range enclosures, but the Elysium is not only their first full tower chassis, but it is their first HPTX capable case as well. Let's see if the Elysium is victorious in offering an appropriate resting place of the biggest and fastest hardware out there.
Currently tower-type coolers are known offer the best cooling performance, so it surprised us a bit to see a new top-flow CPU cooler from Noctua. We were even more surprised by the performance delivered which is better than any other cooler we tested before, including tower-type models.
OCZ recently released a new line of hi-end PSUs in order to keep up the pace with the competition, since the Z series counts many years in production. The new ZX series consists of three 80Plus Gold and fully modular PSUs that feature a single +12V rail and boast that they are designed with maximum performance in mind. The ZX 1250 will be the test subject of today’s review.
Corsair recently updated their modular enthusiast TX PSU series and presented the TX V2. With a quick look at the specifications the most noticeable difference between the old and the updated models is the efficiency upgrade, from plain 80Plus to 80Plus Bronze. Under the hood, we spotted an OEM change from CWT to Seasonic.
Club 3D is one more graphics card manufacturer that decided to follow the latest trend and present a PSU series. In this review we will evaluate their strongest model, which with its 1000 W is able to support up to three VGAs. Our only concern is that it's only 80Plus Bronze certified.
Today AMD releases their HD 6670 which is priced at $100. The card is based on a brand-new graphics processor called "Turks" with 480 shaders and GDDR5 memory. Like all recent cards from AMD the card supports EyeFinity, DirectX 11 and full HD video acceleration.
AMD's new Radeon HD 6450 sets out to compete in the lowest end performance segment. It offers twice the shading power as the aging HD 5450 which results in a solid performance increase in gaming. With a price of $55 it doesn't break the bank, but does it have enough performance for the latest games?
Last week NVIDIA quietly released their GeForce GT 520 which offers DirectX 11 support and comes with a low-profile that can fit into compact media PC systems. Will this $60 card be good enough for gaming, or is the gamer's money better spent on more powerful cards?
The High Current Gamer series, according to Antec, manages to combine high power and increased efficiency with low pricing. As the naming scheme reveals, HCG PSUs are intended for users that want to feed their precious PC with lots of power, but are on a tight budget.
MSI's Radeon HD 6970 Lightning is the company's new flagship single-GPU card for AMD. It offers plenty of overclocking features like triple voltage software control, voltage measurement points, a powerful cooling solution and increased clock speeds out of the box. What is even better is that those features are available at a small price premium of only $10 over the AMD reference design.
The Crucial Ballistix Finned memory does not only look cool, but they also pack an on-board sensor so that you can actually make sure they stay cool during use and extreme overclocking. We take the 1866 MHz kit for a spin to check if it manages to make an impression or barely ding our armor.
The Verbatim Store'n'Go Netbook USB drive is so small that you can plug it into your netbook and just leave it in there. So this is a dead easy way to expand the onboard storage - especially for those first or second generation netbooks with very limited and usually very slow internal flash/SSD storage.
Verbatim packs the Executive Metal flash drive in a fancy dark grey metal shell, promises great read and write performance and offers up to 64 GB of capacity. We take a close look at this weighty flash drive to see if the brains equals the brawns of the storage device.
PowerColor's new HD 6870 PCS++ comes with massively increased clocks out of the box which makes it roughly as fast as GTX 560 Ti or HD 6950. With a reasonable price increase of only $10 over the reference design, the card does not break the bank either, it is actually a worthy opponent to NVIDIA's GTX 560 Ti considering price/performance.
The Verbatim Store'n'Go Clip-it series won the Red Dot Design Award in 2010, as it caters to a very specific scenario and is surprisingly useful. Due to the shape, it is intended to replace the classic paper clip, bringing it into the 21st century.
The V2120 may be the largest chassis from Lian Li. It can not only hold a boatload of drives, but also the biggest enthusiast mainboard on the market: the EVGA SR2. With a hefty price tag we take a look at every aspect of the chassis with eagle eyes, to see if it is the ultimate computer case.
Today AMD is releasing their new Radeon HD 6790 which is targeted at the $150 segment that recently saw some love from NVIDIA in form of their GTX 550 Ti. AMD's new card uses the same GPU as the more powerful HD 6850 and HD 6870, so it will be interesting to see where it stands and whether it can defeat NVIDIA's latest offering.
MSI has engineered their own version of the GeForce GTX 580 called "Lightning", which is geared toward enthusiasts and overclockers. The card brings several exciting features like advanced voltage control and on-board DIP switches for tuning. A dual-BIOS feature with a special liquid nitrogen BIOS is also available.
More compact, quieter but still more powerful - that is what the Sapphire Edge-HD aims to deliver. The Mini-PC boasts the new ION2 chipset along with an Atom N510 dual-core processor. We open the power efficient system up to see what else makes it tick. Does the Edge-HD have what it takes to stand out in the crowded Nettop market?
The latest addition to the long line of chassis from Raidmax, the Aeolus flies in as a top gaming case under $100. While Aeolus is a tribute to "the ruler of the winds" we'll find out if it blows us away or if the wind is knocked out of our sails in our review.
In order to complete their lineup in the $250 segment, AMD has released a 1 GB version of the HD 6950. This makes the card $40 cheaper, yet does not impact performance in any way as our testing shows. We also saw great overclocking potential on our card which makes this card a tweaker's dream combined with the HD 6950 to HD 6970 modding potential.
Evercool sent us a cute little heatsink to toy around with. But as we unpacked it, the low-profile HPK-1002EA heatsink looked bigger than we imagined. We strapped it on to our LGA1366 test-bed right away. Do small-sized "LGA1366 compatible" heatsinks cut it?
In the last PSU review we tested the middle member of the BITWIN series. Now it’s high time for the smallest to confront our vicious load tester. Besides the BW-B430JL we will also present to you detailed information regarding the Multi Link feature, as we are going to link two BITWINs together and gather interesting data (e.g. efficiency at normal and low loads).
MSI's new HD 6950 Twin Frozr III introduces the third version of MSI's exclusive cooling solution. Thanks to two fans and five heatpipes the card runs at excellent temperatures. Tweakers will also love this card as they can adjust three voltages using MSI Afterburner. Another plus is that this card is able to be modded to a HD 6970 by BIOS flash.
Today NVIDIA releases their new GeForce GTX 590 flagship which is based on two GTX 580 GPUs working on a single card. AMD released their dual-GPU HD 6990 design just two weeks ago, with power and heat being the decisive limit on performance it will be a tough fight between those cards.
