Monday Reviews

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I have always been a bit weary of doing reviews of things very subjective and a Bluetooth headset is just one of those things. When Lubix offered to send a review sample over, I was hesitant until they insisted. I'm glad they did since the UBHS-NC1 is a great stereo headset. I'm not a headset kind of person, but as standard Bluetooth headphones, they rock.

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While the next generation of graphics cards from ATI are just around the corner, you can get some amazing performance with full open source support for a great price. Some of the readers might also be looking for a silent solution while having good performance and the Sapphire Radeon HD 3870 Ultimate steps up to provide that. It combines a truly massive heatsink with the powerful 3870 GPU to create a fast and completely silent graphics card for your quiet PC.

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I've always been keen to recommend Crucial in the past when people wanted RAM with a lifetime warranty that works as expected. Not until a few years ago did Crucial start offering their Ballistix overclocking RAM. Fast forward to the new DDR3 days of today and we find a new Ballistix PC3-16000 kit that offers speeds of 2000MHz! You'll be pressed to find a board that can even handle this speed, I know I didn't have one.

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My first orb was the Thermaltake Golden Orb way back when the Abit BP6 was the thing to have. Imagine having to shave a bit of a heatsink off to have it fit on your motherboard. Those were the days when you had to work hard for every once of performance. These days, you can squeeze so much out of new CPUs. Thermaltake has released a brand new orb, the DuOrb. It combines heatpipes and two huge orb coolers.

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Super Micro, are you familiar with them? Chances are that unless your focus is on the workstation and server markets, you probably haven't heard of them. However, this company has been around since 1993 and they have been producing a variety of different motherboards, servers, computer enclosures, and other products to fit the needs of their customers. Super Micro manufacturers a variety of different Intel server motherboards -- and they are one of the few that offers quad-socket Xeon motherboards -- but they also have a growing selection of Core 2 desktop motherboards. The C2SBX+ is one of their newest motherboards and with our first Super Micro review at Phoronix we are looking at this product. This Intel X48 motherboard is designed for digital entertainment, gaming enthusiasts, and other high-end applications.

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With the Xaser VI, Thermaltake has an aluminum full-tower chassis that will rival the best in it's class. The innovative tool-free features are well executed and make working in this Xaser a real pleasure. Arguably the best feature is the sliding motherboard tray. Or maybe the hard drive mounting solution. What about the densely populated front panel I/O plate? Or the outstanding cooling design? There's a lot of stuff here to like, and I like the vast majority of it.

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We have seen many newcomers to the computer cooling industry; and lately, many of these newcomers have been making a name for themselves, like Noctua and Zerotherm. These companies are now competing against well-established manufacturers like ThermalRight and Zalman, and today, we will be reviewing another heatsink and fan from SilenX - even another manufacturer that is quickly becoming a big player in the PC cooling industry.

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Founded in 2005, Mvix USA is a company who believes in the concept of digital entertainment. With a product line that offers different versions of this ideal, Mvix is about getting your digital content displayed where it should be, on your television. Sure, you can watch your ripped movies on the PC monitor, but why not take it to the next level and enjoy that same content on a large screen TV? Enter one of their latest arrivals, the MX-780HD. While having many similarities with the older 760-series media center, MVix has raised the bar and brought newer technologies to the scene. On top of this, they have also improved output as well. So kick up your heels as we take a look at the Mvix MX-780HD. We will look at the features included, then take it for a test drive by displaying digital movies on a 37

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We mainly know Lenovo for their line of ThinkPad notebooks, but consumers really do not like those laptops because of their plain styling. Luckily for consumers Lenovo has released a new line of notebooks called their IdeaPad series. We first got a look at Lenovo's Ideapad series at CES earlier this year. Out of the 3 new notebooks we were most interested in the very tiny U110. This small laptop has a lot of very innovative features like a LED backlit screen and facial recognition. At only 2.92lbs it is a perfect notebook for traveling and mobile users. Will all these features make the U110 worth its price tag? Read on to find out.

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Yuin's PK1 earbuds were all the rage when they first hit the market quite a while ago. Since then Yuin has further upped the stakes by introducing the new and improved OK-series earphones. Today we take a look at the PK1s to see if the former earbud champion can still compete in today's market.

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It seems as of late the nForce 790i is finally making its rounds through our labs, most likely because of the GTX 280 performing as well as it does, especially in SLI and Tri SLI configurations. So far we have had the ZOTAC board cross us; now it's time for MSI, one of the biggest motherboard makers in Taiwan, and one of the biggest presences here in Australia to have its time in the sun. Today we have been given the P7N2 Diamond motherboard. This baby is aimed at being the top gun of all 790i SLI boards out there. While that's a good aim, does it perform? - Let's see.

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Quote: The graphics on the Qismio x305 will be powered by the yet to be announced NVIDIAGeForce 9800M GTX graphics card, which has 1GB of video memory. For those that still want to game, but save some hard earned dollars we overheard that consumers can customize the notebook with the less expensive GeForce 9700M GT graphics card rather than the GeForce 9800M GTX. NVIDIA hasn't said much about this un-released graphics card, but they did have the Toshiba Qosmio x305 notebook on display at a Microsoft Corporation event this week called the Games for Windows Presents: The Big Picture...

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If you've never heard of Meridian, well, I hate to say it, but it's probably because you're just like me and can't afford to spend your entire annual income on a pair of loudspeakers. While I think it's safe to say that the F80 won't set you back that much, it's definitely not a cheap audio solution either. Let's take a closer look and see what kind of value the unit has to offer...

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drive technology only in terms of notebook products, then recently, Western Digital probably helped expand your horizons a bit. With the release of their VelociRaptor 300GB SATA hard drive, mainstream users were exposed to the advantages of the high transfer rates associated with 2.5

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* Gaming peripherals are something that not many hardware enthusiasts spend much time on; as the title suggests, it's more of a gamer thing. However, many underestimate what effect a simple mouse or keyboard upgrade can have on their PC usage in terms of comfort and features. The peripheral overlooked most of al however, is the mouse mat. From it's humble beginnings as a poorly held-in-place piece of foam, gaming mouse mats were born and today, I'm testing one that's been causing a stir with it's flashy looks; bring on, the Roccat Sense: Adrenalin Blue.

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Quote: The Asus 9600 GT TOP edition is obviously not the fastest card in NVIDIA's line up but that is not the goal here. As of this writing, the Asus 9600 GT is selling for $129 after a $20 Mail-in-rebate, which is an astounding value! You get a card with a great cooling, low-noise heat sink, and an overclocked card for the same price as a reference model. Though the performance differences weren't that large compared to the reference card the heat sink easily makes this card the, forgive the pun, TOPS in its class...

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How many times do you get than you bargained for? Sure, when you're taking a risk you can end up worse of then you started. But we're talking about the other end of the spectrum. When was the last time you went shopping for something only to realize it was on sale or it was a two-for-one day? It's times like these that you really feel like you got your money's worth. In the world of computing these feelings occur even less often. Not because of lack of deals or overpriced equipment but rather the pace of innovation. What is a good deal today will be next to nothing in a few months making the decision of when to buy a daunting one.

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Quote: Despite the Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR3-1600 dual channel memory kit having fairly loose timings (9-9-9-37), it manages to keep pace with other kits rated much more aggressively (7-7-7-18). The performance at 1600MHz and higher was just fine, the only issue I had was that getting there was not as easy as with other kits. Of the five kits used in this review, the one from Kingston was the only one to lack an XMP profile in SPD.

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Crucial being one of the most realized and a respected name in memory reproduction has graciously offered a set of Ballistix PC3-16000 for reviewing. With 9-9-9-28 timings being rather high latency can we adjusted with a little tweaking and voltage. But hitting 2000MHz isn't something many of us have seen from other own system. But Crucial today will give us that opportunity.

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A few weeks ago we looked at the Sunbeamtech Core-Contact Freezer, our first crack at a heatpipe to Integrated Heat Spreader (IHS) direct contact CPU heatsink. In retrospect, nothing other than the base was very remarkable; at least nothing that would lead us to believe anything other than the contact point would cause such great performance. The fan used from Sunbeamtech was a silent type that does not push a large amount of air, and this only confirmed that direct heatpipe to CPU technology is more than just a marketing tool. Today we will be looking at another direct contact cooler, this time from SilenX. The SilenX iXtrema IXC-120HA2 is very similar to the SBT CCF; they even share the same mounting hardware. While the two are similar, they are not identical. The SilenX version is more robust, giving us the option of using two 120mm fans (one on each side of the fins). This is a feature that SBT did not include with their offering.

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AMD/ATI has released two new high-end graphics chips recently, Radeon HD 4870 and Radeon HD 4850, known by the codenames RV770 XT and RV770 PRO, respectively. As you can guess by the numbers, HD 4850 provides a lower performance compared to HD 4870. In this review we will benchmark HD 4850 from Sapphire and compare it to its main competitors from nVidia. Is this video card a good buy? Check it out.

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The In-Win B2 is without a doubt a gamer orientated ATX chassis. Designed with aspects and features to resemble a B2 stealth bomber plane this military looking case is apt to turn some heads. It has a fully functional automatic hatch at the front and comes with four case fans to keep your hardware inside running cool.

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Today we are going to review a graphics card that has the same dimensions and weight as the GTX 280, but it has a narrower bus and fewer unified processors. Besides, it's noticeably cheaper. Meet the GeForce GTX 260.

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The 790i is the first chipset from NVIDIA to be re-designed totally. 790i has its own PCI Express 2.0 controller built into the chipset along with a new memory controller for DDR3 memory with support for EPP 2.0, and today we have ZOTAC's high performance motherboard to play with. ZOTAC has definitely made its mark with us. While our first board we received from them based on the GeForce 8300 chipset failed to impress, the 790i Ultra SLI board really got us going.

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The Radeon HD 4870 is the first retail graphics card to use GDDR5 memory and the 512MB of memory uses Qimonda branded ICs. GDDR5 introduces features and functions that go beyond previous GDDR standards and enables GDDR5 to operate at data rates up to 6 Gbps, three times the performance of todays high speed GDDR3. The memory ICs feature adaptive power management, error compensation, adaptive interface timings and date eye optimization. The ICs being used are part number IDGV1G-05A1F1C-40X, which are entry level GDDR5 chips and are rated for just 4 Gbps. ATI has them clocked at just 3.6 Gbps, so these should have some overclocking head room left in them...