Wed Reviews

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I know what you are thinking. "I already read the G7 reviews in the past." Plus, you probably own a G7 already. Why would I be reviewing such an old product that even I reviewed in the past? Simple, this is a new product from Logitech. It has the same name, but a refreshed design. Meet the black G7!

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The Akasa Integral P2 LAN is just one of many hard drive enclosures from Akasa. It looks quite sleek and solid, holds the hard drive well and comes with everything needed. Setting up the drive may not be as easy as other variants, but the software is bug free and easy to use. You can even use up to eight of these units to build a RAID setup.

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The Thermaltake Mozart TX Cube Tower Case is very big on features. They have done a fantastic job on this product, from the inside out! There's no mistaking this product because of its size. It's one of the largest consumer cases on the planet. Being a monster though means you can fit a lot of computer gear inside and that's what it's all about! There are plenty of drive bays, lots of fans, and it even accepts two motherboards. This case has hardcore entertainment box written all over it! Watch the Video to find out more...

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* Silverstone are no strangers to case designing, with over 30 different cases catering for everyones needs, they definitely should have learnt every trick in the book to make their cases the best.

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With the Straight Power series they hope to raise the bar when it comes to high power, low noise, stable voltages and a low ripple. Three of these have a tendency to move in different directions when the power goes up. The voltage goes down, the ripple increase and what is the most obvious to the buyer; the noise increases significantly at a higher power output.

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Every so often TWL gets a peripheral that is just plain cool. Our friends over at Flexiglow sent us one of their products called Cyber Snipa dog tags. Now, to be honest when we first heard they wanted to send us dog tags, TWL was thinking Jewelry? Though with is premonition of a couple of games hanging out at a LAN party sporting their bling, we said we would be glad to take a look.

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Today, we are going to be looking at NZXT's latest offering, the Adamas Classic Series to see if this new full aluminum chassis might fit your dream systems needs with its classic style and design.

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The one thing no-one who owns this case can complain about is the ability to cool a hard working set of components. There isn't a noisy and in-efficient 80mm fan in sight, my arch nemesis, and that monster 200mm fan up top is far from a gimmick. It does an incredible job of exhausting hot air from the case. The futuristic and clean appearance of the Nine Hundreds exterior is sure to turn heads and like all Antec enclosures, the Nine Hundred is extremely well put together and the finish is second to none.

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Everyone must surely remember the introduction of the GeForce 7900 GS a = month and a half ago by NVIDIA. At the same time NVIDIA also announced = another card that would replace the GeForce 7900 GT. The GeForce 7950 GT = bring graphics horsepower with a faster core clock and a whopping 512MB = of memory while delivering exceptionally smooth frame rates at maximum = settings. The NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GT is capable of supporting HDCP. Make = no mistake this isn't a dual-GPU accelerator like the GeForce 7950 GX2, = and except for the kind of similar naming the suffix just mentions GT = and that means a single core video card.

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The X1300 XT is a new budget card, basically a revision of an older X1600 series video card. For this reason and because we took a look at the X1650 Pro, which is also quite similar, just a few days ago, this review is going to be quick and dirty.

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The Ultron G1-Clawpad has an interesting look to it. As soon as you see it, you will notice what it is for: having all the needed keys for a game within reach of the left hand. It does not only look good, but feels great as well. The buttons are responsive and comfortable. Gaming with the G1-Clawpad is very nice once the hand has gotten used to its new weapon of choice.

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The case is constructed primarily of lighter gauged steel and plastic components which certainly helps to keep the weight down as opposed to Antec's previous heavier steel construction. The fit and finish of the case is quite good which has become the norm with all Antec® cases. I really like the mat black paint job which for a change seems highly resistant to fingerprints and other tarnishing. The exterior of the case actually cleans quite easily.

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I'm sure by now all of you have heard of Crucial. If you haven't crucial makes some of the best memory out there today and their memory advisor is great for finding the best ram when your ready to upgrade. They recently celebrated their 10th anniversary. In recognition of this they have released a special edition of their PC2-5300 module. This special edition features an exclusive heat spreader that you will not find on any other Crucial modules, so let's take a look.

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With all the new video cards available on the market today the manufactures are fighting for your dollar. This is good for us the consumers and Sapphire wants to make sure that you get the most bangs for your buck. The X1950 Pro could be the card for a reasonable price. With the new Native CrossFire, Core RV570, Shader Model 3.0 vertex and pixel shader support along with other features you just have to take a look.

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One of those options may be one of their latest offerings, the Zorro. The Zorro offers a lot of interior spacing and a refreshing design. And for those that are not into doors in the front of the case that opens outwards, this one's door slides up and down for easy access to your drives bays.

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Abit has a long history of producing top notch motherboards for overclockers and enthusiasts. Their new AW9D-MAX is designed for Intel's Core 2 platform using the i975X chipset. On the feature list there is everybody you could find useful: Dual Gigabit Ethernet, 8x SATA-II, Firewire and two PCI-Express x16 slots for your video cards. To make your life easier this board includes abit's proprietary UGuru technology. We test the board thoroughly to see if it can live up to the hype, especially when it comes to overclocking.

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ECS has come up with an awesome motherboard packed with lots of extras. ATI's newest chipset shows that they are headed in the right direction and that performance does not have to be heavy on the wallet. ECS's reputation for providing decent products at a decent price has just been bumped up a notch to provided great products to enthusiast builders at a great price.

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The unit itself is very attractive with black anodized aluminum that make up the bulk of the chassis. An injection molded piece of clear acrylic caps the bottom of the power supply. Depending on which color you choose, the power plug, power switch, and sleeved cables could be red, green or blue. Inside we see a pair of green anodized heat syncs, a red PC board, a blue highlighted transformer, yellow primary stage capacitors and the rest of the support electronics.

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OCZ Technology is at it again attempting to push the envelope for flash media. When they had introduced the Rally it was a smoking fast flash drive that had finally stolen the performance crown from Corsair's Flash Voyager. After that OCZ pushed the physical envelope for flash drives with the incredibly small Mini-Kart. Now OCZ Technology is at it again, but this time around they are attempting to push the storage capacity for computer users. The OCZ Mega-Kart offers an 8GB storage capacity while retaining a small footprint, and best of all an economically-minded price.

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Before we get too involved in v2 you may want to read the review of the original thing. Looking at the product we can see that whatever was changed from the first version to the second must not have been that drastic because they look identical. From the first review you can see that I was happy with the 5H- it was simple to use, smartly designed, and different from the rest of the products on the market. I really liked that the headset could be broken down into three pieces and that the microphone was built into the earpiece. The sound quality was pretty good, not an industry leader but still acceptable, though the price was definitely an issue.

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There are many players in the computer memory industry that are trying to claw their way to the top and become a name that is synonomous with enthusiasts. Buffalo Technology is one of those companies, and though they are not new in the industry, they are trying to break into the enthusiast realm. Do they have what it takes to do it? Find out as we take a look at their PC2-8500 offering.

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With so many high performance laptops coming out there needs to be some way of cooling them so they perform at top notch. With some laptops stock cooling just does not cut it. There are so many laptop cooling pads out there it is hard to choose. Well today I have a laptop cooler that is very different than many others. You can open and close it to the desired size you need so if you have multiple laptops you can use it on both. Also because it is contractible it makes it easier to travel with. So let's take a look at the Hiyatek Contractible Laptop Cooling Pad.

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The product we'll be discussing comes from a company named Ultrasone that many of us are probably not all that familiar with. There are a couple reasons why you may not have heard of Ultrasone before. First of all they're based in Germany, and since they were founded in 1991, they're also fairly new as well. Ultrasone's focus has primarily been on providing high-end headphones to professionals in the music industry, so most of their products are priced higher than what most the average person would be willing to pay for headphones. The PROline 650 headphones that we'll be looking at today aren't what I'd consider

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Our theoretical article about ATI AVIVO technologies had been published = long ago. But we had no time to test hardware accelerated video = playback. It had to do with the fact that both ATI and NVIDIA were = developing support for video decoding in drivers so actively, that = nearly each release introduced lots of new features. So it was difficult = to compare GPU performance, as the situation would change every month. = And now everything seems to settle down a bit. Either ATI and NVIDIA = fine tuned their support for video decoding, mentioned in our = theoretical article, or they just grew tired of this task. So we decided = to analyze the situation with hardware accelerated video decompression = and playback.

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The 975X has shown itself to be quite resilient despite some newer chipsets on the market. Intel themselves must be fans since they repackaged it again for quad core support. While stability is something that should be a standard, this has not always been the case with many motherboards released. The MSI 975X Platinum V.2 is a solid reboot and was very reliable and consistent in our testing. Little things like this is important as it makes for a more enjoyable computing experience and also leaves us with more hair as we're less prone to getting frustrated and yanking it out.

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Looking back to the key marketing features Silverstone is presenting I'd say the results meet the marketing about half way. Certainly the case does have a clean, sophisticated appearance, and it does present many cooling options if you require them; however, given the depth of the case, the storage capacity could be severely hampered with the wrong mix of components, and you'll have a difficult time keeping this case quiet enough to be inaudible during quiet sections of movies or games if it's not stationed in a console or cabinet.

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The HIS X1950Pro 256MB Video Card performs very well and has all the technologies to support current games. This series of video card has the new crossfire bridge which makes installation much easier than the cumbersome external cable used previously. One of the best things about this product is the price. It's very affordable! This video card has enormous bang-for-the-buck. Watch the Video to find out more...

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Quote: Intel has been cranking out impressive processors during 2006 and it looks like Intel has any intentions of bringing that to an end any time soon. The first Intel quad-core processor looks to be a winner in a number of ways, but the most important is the fact that many motherboards that have the i975 Express chipset need nothing more than a BIOS update to enable quad-core support. When it comes to applications that take advantage of four cores no other desktop processor from AMD, or even Intel for that matter, come close to the performance levels that we have recorded with quad-core.

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If it wasn't enough that NZXT is crafting some of the finest cases available to the market today, they are also reinventing the wheel; with success. The tool-less panel design incorporated in the Adamas is one of the most durable latch systems I have yet to see. You won't find more then a bottle-cap worth of plastic used to build this case; and even then we're talking about small pieces used to secure drive doors and make cushion feet for the case. It really seems as though the marketing department over at NZXT didn't have to stretch the imagination in describing this case.

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How the CPU architecture communicates with the memory is one part of the equation. Another part is how the architecture processes data. Before, CPU instructions would break up the data into small bits and executing them at the same time. How it changes now is the processor will combine similar instructions and execute them at the same time. This method is far more efficient and there is less latency involved.

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As the basis for a HTPC, this is an excellent choice. The board was designed to be used as a stable platform for desktop and HTPC use and it does this job with aplomb. I feel that anyone looking for an inexpensive motherboard for a HTPC will find this board offers everything they are looking for, including the low price.

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Quote: Both of these coolers feature unique designs which definitely grab your attention, as well as providing respectable cooling performance. The Eclipse and Mars coolers performed much better than the stock AMD CPU cooler, and allowed an AMD X2 4200 AM2 processor to be kept cool even while overclocked.