Monday Reviews

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Now please keep in mind that this article is in no way a power supply review. You have not just witnessed some sort of weird five-way power supply shootout. There are so many good things to say about ALL of the power supplies I used today. For example, the voltage drop going from 0A to 11A on both the Antec NeoHE and Corsair HX620W was actually LESS than the FSP600-80GLC power supply with fixed cables. But the focus of today's article was to simply clarify some of the fuzzy math used to create fud over modular power supplies, therefore we focused primarily on the drop from the power supply's PCB to the load.

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If you are thinking about the latest kit or if you have recently purchased an AM2 or Core 2 Duo processor, you'll probably already know about the superb overclocking potential on offer. To take your system to the edge requires some pukka ram. So what's the best DDR2 on the market?

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With OCZ Technology coming to the memory market, enthusiasts finally had a company that was willing to provide everything wanted out of our memory and provided the best customer service on the block. They continue to develop the best memory around and their customer service is second to none. OCZ have come from the grass-roots to bring you to new heights, and their products speak for themselves. OCZ Technology knows enthusiasts and what it takes to satisfy their intense, high-performance cravings. The elite Platinum Edition series offers the latest extreme speeds and are optimized with leading-edge Enhanced Latency and Enhanced Bandwidth technology.

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Are you looking for huge storage that won't hurt the pocketbook? Easily done, since the 500GB RE2 drive we are looking at today retails for around $250. Does it have the performance you are looking for?

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We at BFR have reviewed quite a few LCD monitor's in our time, all of in various shapes and sizes ranging from 17" to 23" but today we have a treat. Samsung's 244T is a monster 24" LCD display and we had it all to ourselves for the past few weeks. The 244T comes packed with features including a 8ms response time, 500 cd/m2, and a super high 1000:1 contrast ratio.

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Being a big fan of Razer products we excited to have the chance to review their newest gaming mouse 'The Krail' along with their new gaming surface called the Mantis. Razer was nice enough to include both the 'Speed Surface' and the 'Control Surface' for us to test and see what we though of this new three-pack of gaming terror. So come on along a see what our views and thoughts are on these new products.

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With a steady number of motherboards starting to trickle through that support Intel's Core 2 Duo, ASUS's PW5 DH Deluxe is, we reckon, one of the better ones around.

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Foxconn has been trying hard recently to shed its image as a budget hardware provider, but I think this board, the C51XEM2AA 8EKRS2H is the first that really made me sit up and notice them as a new player in the high end motherboard market. Based on the new nForce 590 chipset, this board is packed with a plethora of features and claims to offer huge tweaking and overclocking potential.

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The Phylon 727FWE-1G5 is a versatile and economical 1.5 GHz Mini-ITX mainboard equipped with the new VIA C7 processor. With the optional add-on boards, a variety of additional features can be added: CardBus/CF reader, Serial ports, additional LAN ports etc.

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Asus are well known for high quality and performance, a hard combo to attain much less maintain on a constant basis. With the A8R32-MVP Deluxe, Asus once again shows us a motherboard that not only is built well but one that also performs very well. Overclocking is only hampered by a limited voltage range on the VCore adjustment, and possibly the complexity of all of the available options.

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Crucial is one of the world's leading memory manufacturers. If you have Crucial in your machine people know you have a quality rig and you value performance. Today for review I have 2 gigs of Crucial Ballistix DDR2 PC2-5300 for review, running at low latencies of 3-3-3-12. I'm going to put it up against some Corsair and Super Talent DDR2 and see what we get for results.

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OCZ has been launching some amazing kits lately, and this one is no exception. In our tests, we have managed to bring this modest DDR2-900 up to DDR2-1140 speeds and still retain some great stability.

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The sturdy construction, classy backlighting, and highly customizable macro keys put the G15 at the top of the gaming keyboard heap. Add on features like the cable management system, full media player support, and the only LCD in the keyboard market, and you've got..

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The C51XEM2AA-8EKRS2H might not exactly be an easy name to remember, but this board started out as a reference board for NVIDIA's NFORCE 590 SLI chipset. Being an enthusiast-oriented chipset, the C51 (as we call it) should have many overclocking and tweaking features to satisfy us.

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Intel's Core 2 Duo is beiong touted as a revolution in processor performance, but does it live up to the hype? ByteSizedReviews takes our usual to-the-point look at Intels new line of CPUs, putting the E6700 and X6800 against AMD's flagship; the FX62.

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In this review of the ASrock AM2V890-VSTA motherboard we'll be looking at how the VIA K8T890 handles itself around the socket AM2 Athlon64 FX-62 processor. The ASRock AM2V890-VSTA Socket AM2 motherboard is the first motherboard to cross PCSTATS' test bench based on the VIA K8T890 chipset. This compact ATX motherboard has four 240 pin DDR2 memory slots which accommodate up to 8GB of DDR-2 memory. The AM2V890-VSTA motherboard easily accommodates a PCI Express x16 videocard, although a second can be inserted into the adjacent PCI Express x4 slot for multiple monitor outputs - SLI is not supported.

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The Corsair TWIN2X-8500 is a strong performer at both high frequency and low latencies. Basically, depending on your needs, the ram can easily switch between the two options. To be truthful, the main market for this memory is going to be users with 1066MHz CPUs so that they can run their memory 1:1. That said, I think overall you'll see better numbers if you can tighten the timings at the expense of a slightly lower clock speed.

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Logitech introduced the world's first mouse-and-keyboard combination in 1998 with the goal of removing cord clutter from the desk. They succeeded in delivering on that vision, and they are now addressing a different kind of clutter - cleaning up the mess of notifications and information that are displayed on the computer monitor. The Logitech Cordless Desktop MX 5000 Laser desktop pushes that information to a peripheral screen so that people can choose when to glance at their notifications and status information, and can therefore clear their monitors - and their minds.

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It was only a matter of time before a company would release speedy DDR2-1100 modules, and OCZ has officially become the first. As one would expect, with such speed also comes loose timings. 5-6-6... ouch! We will see if tightening of those timings is possible, and also see if we can push them beyond their 550MHz speeds.