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Cooler Master Silent Pro M 700W
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 Noise in computer systems is an ever growing problem – one which many enthusiasts strive to deal with. A Power supply is often thought as quite a quiet component of the hardware which makes your PC. However, turn off all of your running fans and just listen to the noise from the PSU; you’ll be pleasantly surprised. For this reason, Cooler Master has developed the Silent Pro which boasts a sound level of less than 16dBA.
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Vizo Uranus HDD enclosure
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The demand for external hard drives has increased significantly in recent years, due to the need for more storage space and the added security from backing up data. A 500GB hard drive can be bought for as little as £35 and so pairing this with an external hard drive enclosure is a cheap way of protecting your data. The benefit of a hard drive enclosure over a pre-built external hard drive is that you can use one the old hard drives you may have lying around.
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AcoustiFeet Case Feet
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Case feet aren’t the most interesting of products; however they happen to be parts of your case which can seriously reduce a lot of noise due to vibrations. Today we’ll be replacing out Lian Li V1000’s wheels with some soft AcoustiFeet in hope of reducing noise.
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Logitech VX Nano Notebook Mouse
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There isn’t a lot of enthusiasm for laptop track-pads. Most of the people I speak to seem to hate track-pads and normally opt out for a trusty old mouse. However, using a big fat chunky mouse on long journeys where you don’t have much space isn’t really ideal. Thankfully, Logitech have saved us with their VX Nano; a cordless pocket size mouse. Let’s see how it performs…
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NVIDIA are overlooking a still-competitive opponent
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"Of the three companies in this debate today, Intel, AMD and NVIDIA,
only one is balanced in the vision that both NVIDIA and Intel supposedly see
for the industry. AMD has both a CPU and GPU that are competitive in
today's market; not leaders in any definitive way but right up there none
the less. Thanks to the acquisition of ATI by AMD nearly two years ago the
combined organization seems poised to capitalize on the shifting dynamics in
the designs of both processing dynamics. And much of what Intel and NVIDIA
are doing today is actually validating what AMD has done over the past 24
months."
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AMD Radeon HD 3650 is a mid-range low cost GPU
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"When the Radeon HD 3650 card was first released we were a little
underwhelmed by the specifications as it seemed that nothing had been
improved upon when compared to the previous, RV600-based HD 2600-series of
cards. And in fact that is the case: performance remains mostly the same
while power consumption has dropped and thus heat output too. That doesn't
make the HD 3650 a home run though as NVIDIA's answers to the card continue
to stack up and perform better - the 8600 GTS with half the frame buffer was
easily outpacing the Sapphire HD 3650 card with 512MB of GDDR3 memory even
when overclocked."
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ASUS U6E 12.1" Notebook
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Mobile computing doesn't have to be boring - the U6E from ASUS proves that. Within its 12-inch frame is some of the best styling around and very competent hardware, along with a full-sized keyboard, fingerprint reader and four USB ports. Does this small notebook win big time?
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Thecus N5200BR NAS (Network Attached Storage) Review
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"Storage freaks rejoice! Even with 1TB hard drives, 32GB USB
thumb drives, and external HDD enclosures, the true storage junkie is
always looking for a simpler, better, and more secure way of stashing
their collection of por, er, movies, music, pictures, and important
files. Featuring five hot swappable SATAII drive bays in RAID 0,1,5,
6,and 10, as well as JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Disks), and over 3TB of
storage space, the N5200 NAS (Network Attached Storage) box trumps
standard storage devices like those mentioned above in that you can
access it from any point on your network, instead of attaching it to one
device at a time."
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Tuniq Miniplant 950W
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"I was pleased to see that the Miniplant came with a 3-year warranty, which adds a certain amount of value to the unit. The Miniplant comes with a very large price tag that could be hard to justify, however this power supply was able to deliver decent performance for what I could test with. When added in with the warranty I believe that it would be worth the price. As for SLI Ready I could not located this PSU anywhere on Nvidia's site as a recommended PSU for SLI setups."
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Corsair TX750W PSU
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"Carefully opening the power supply and lifting the top reveals the 140mm Yate Loon fan. This fan is rated at 2800 RPM, 140 CFM and 48.5dBA at 12 volts. An awful lot of airflow and high noise penalty as well. The upside to this fan is that it is temperature controlled and should be quite silent when not spooled up. Included on this fan is a clear plastic deflector toward the rear of the case. This presumably is to force more air through the power supply to provide adequate cooling rather than allow the rear airflow to just blow out the back of the power supply with no cooling benefit."
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Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB Review
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"What a crazy week this has been. First, with the unintentional early release of the 4850, followed by the nVidia bombshell announcement of the 9800GTX+, there has not been a dull moment. All this chaos in the market has precipitated a serious price war in which all of us win. Even with the MSRP of $199, we are already seeing the 4850 sell for as low as $160. 8800GTX like performance for under two bills? Yes, please! All on a design that sips power and uses a single slot cooler? Where do I sign up?"
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HorsePower 750w PSU Review
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The HorsePower PSU can boast a number of great features... Four 12v rails, Power Protection from over current, over voltage and short-circuits protection, and to top that off, it offers up 80+ power efficiency. Great looks and Performance are all that I ever ask with my hardware."
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Logitech G5 Version 2 Gaming Mouse
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One of the leading dominators of the gaming mouse market is Logitech. Since their MX518 gaming mouse release, their mice have grown from strength to strength. Today we’ve got one of the newer gaming mice, in the flavour of the G5 Version 2. Let’s see if it lives up to its predecessors…
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PC gaming market
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"One question that immediately came to mind while sitting and
starting at this information was: will it actually help? One of key
problems with the PC gaming market (and that AMD agrees with) is that the
variances in hardware, drivers, vendors and software make compatibility an
issue and lead gamers into negative experiences that sour the PC as a gaming
platform. AMD's goal was to try and prevent that issue by creating GAME!
that would attempt to set certain standards for PC in order to guarantee a
quality gaming experience."
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MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte
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While we are very used to seeing bickering between companies like NVIDIA and
ATI, AMD and Intel and Microsoft and Sony, one segment of the PC market that
has been surprisingly quiet over the years has been the manufacturing
vendors like MSI, ASUS and Gigabyte. Well that all seems to be behind us
now as a "day time melo-drama" of sorts has broken out between two companies
that were at one point last on the brink of merging.
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OCZ 64GB SATA-I model
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"I knew coming into this review that the solid state drives were
going to differ greatly from standard hard drives in terms of performance
but I didn't know exactly how much and in which ways. The very obvious
strong spot for the OCZ 64GB SSD is the pure speed it demonstrated in random
access times; with a time of 0.2 ms compared to the 6.9 ms of our fastest
platter-based hard drive the OCZ SSD is 345x faster in get that single bit
of data. This can obviously incredible beneficial to applications that
utilize a HUGE amount of random reads as long as those reads are for very
small bits of data."
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Super Talent Project X PC3-16000 2GB Memory Kit Review
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"Flashy name with stylized logo, check. Big, intimidating
heatsink, check. Killer ratings to back up claims of such, check. While
Super Talent has all the makings for an enthusiast brand with its new
Project X series, how well it performs in the field is what really
matters for success. The rating of PC3-16000 makes it one of very first
kits on the market to carry such a blazing fast frequency, but will this
new high speed RAM have what it takes to stack up head to head with the
competition?"
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