A-DATA's S599 128 GB SSD uses the well-established SandForce SF-1222 controller. This results in a high-performance solution - actually it is the fastest SandForce drive we tested so far. Excellent performance and an outstanding price of $225 make this one of the best SSDs available on the market at this time.
Akasa made an attempt to spice up product design by giving one of its latest CPU coolers a mean toxic-yellow color scheme, backed by a well-equipped heatsink design. Can the Akasa Venom strike a sweet-spot between looks and performance?
USB 3.0 enclosures seem to become more affordable by the minute and the noir S combines a stylish brushed Aluminum shell with the new, speedy interface. We take the unit apart and give it a run for its money to see how the no-frills USB 3.0 enclosure performs.
In this article we will investigate how much the HD 4870, HD 5870, GTX 285 and GTX 480 have gained over the lifetime of their driver releases. We also put this in contrast to what the latest AMD Catalyst 10.12 driver update can deliver.
MP4Nations Brainwavz M2 is the slightly odd name for a set of mid-end in-ears. Despite the name, the in-ears boast a wealth of small innovations that makes them very competitive at their respective price point.
Zalman and its unique fin-ring type heatsinks ruled the roost once upon a time, but things changed with the advent of tower-type coolers. Zalman continued to innovate with a redesigned CNPS9900 MAX, even after going tower-design with the CNPS 10 series. Exactly what made Zalman go back to its traditional design?
Mach Xtreme has managed to bring a USB 3.0 flash drive to market with some very interesting performance numbers coupled with a very affordable price. We push the stick through our benchmarks to see if it manages to stay Xtreme or just fizzles into oblivion.
Exclusive, in-depth preview of a brand new player in the Aluminum Case market: Cubitek. The Tank Series of cases aim to bring some turmoil into the strong grip exerted by Lian Li and we have the chance to take a quick look at one of their cases, set to be released in Q1 2011.
Razer has just released a revamped version of their old Lachesis mouse. The revision features a much newer Philip Twin-eye laser sensor which is capable of producing coherent tracking at up to 200 IPS, at a maximum resolution of 5600 DPI. We put it to the test and see if this specification-monster is good in real life application.
In this review we will look at the performance of two Radeon HD 6950 cards running in CrossFire. This delivers a massively powerful graphics solution that is over 25% faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 580 and also beats AMD HD 5970. At $600, this setup also manages to deliver maximum price/performance when looked at from a high-end graphics angle.
AMD's new Radeon HD 6970 comes with an improved shader architecture that promises more performance with less transistors, consuming less power. Another interesting aspect is the inclusion of a power limitation system that ensures maximum performance when needed and avoids damage to the graphics cards.
HIS Radeon HD 6950 is a new option in the $300 upper midrange graphics card segment. It has enough power to play the latest titles in Full HD resolution. Thanks to improved geometry and tesselation engines it also promises to deliver increased performance in latest titles compared to the Radeon HD 5870.
There are literally thousands of choices out there when buying a pre-configured external hard drive. With many factors to account for, like warranty duration, price, looks, size or performance, the choice is hard. We take a look at the Verbatim Store'n'Go 320GB which is available in loads of different colors, to see if it delivers on all of these aspects.
The Akasa Baymaster combines a 2.5 inch hot-swap bay with an array of slots for different memory cards - all in a very compact 3.5 inch drive bay. You even get two different colored front, so that the affordable device looks good in every case.
Xigmatek makes sure each new product has a little something new to look out for, often these turn out to be as revolutionary as the "Heatpipe Direct Touch" (HDT) itself. With the Aegir SD128264, Xigmatek claims to have taken HDT to the next level (quite literally), and added a second level of heatpipes that draw heat from the CPU. Will this innovation bear fruit?
Fractal has updated the Define chassis once more. The R3 revision comes with an interesting list of upgrades and features. We take it for a spin to see if it can keep up with the modern times and if it manages to impress in the light of stiff competition in the same price segment.
Today NVIDIA launches their new GeForce GTX 570 graphics card which is based on the new more power efficient Fermi technology that we saw on the GTX 580, too. ASUS' GTX 570 is a full reference design implementation, the only difference is a small clock speed increase of 10 MHz.
NVIDIA's new GeForce GTX 570 complements the GTX 580 at more affordable price levels. It offers the same reduced power consumption as its big brother without compromising performance. Palit's GTX 570 is a custom design with a unique thermal solution and substantially increased clock speeds out of the box.
PowerColor's HD 6870 PCS+ comes with some of the highest out of the box clock speeds of all HD 6870 cards available today. It also comes with a unique thermal solution that offers extremely low noise levels in both idle and load. Another improvement is that power consumption is slightly lower than AMD's reference design - despite the higher clock speed.
Sunrise known for their well performing earbuds also produce a set of quite interesting in-ears. Dubbed the SW-Xcape these in-ears are priced at a somewhat reasonable $80.
Corsair has put a lot of engineering into their Obsidian case line-up and everyone had eagerly been awaiting their first mid-tower case offering. Enter stage left: Corsair Graphite 600T, which takes a lot of the features of the Obsidian and packs it into a uniqe looking case at a much lower price point. We tear it apart and put it back together, to see if it can impress as much as the Obsidian series.
Last week NVIDIA launched their GeForce GTX 460 SE which is designed to give a good price/performance level without compromising on memory amount. But is this enough to compete with the full GTX 460 variants that have 768 MB or 1 GB of memory?
Gigabyte's GeForce GTX 480 Super Overclock sets out to deliver affordable high-end overclocking for NVIDIA users. The card features dual voltage software control, voltage measurement points, a powerful but quiet triple fan cooler and Gigabyte's OC Guru overclocking software. Best of all, it comes at a reasonable $469 which is not much more than the reference design. But is that enough to hold off the GeForce GTX 580 ?
There are very few manufacturers of completely passive systems out there. Impactics is jumping into the fray, aiming to offer fan-less systems, but without the large price premium associated to such computers. We take a look at the black, H55 and i3-530 equipped system to see if it can keep going under the pressure, or if it crumbles under the heat.
Last week NVIDIA released their new flagship graphics card, the GeForce GTX 580. Today we have on our testbench the ASUS ENGTX580 which is an almost full implementation of the reference design. The only exception is that the clock speed has been slightly increased - at no price premium.
