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OCZ Platinum XTE PC3-16000 2x2GB review
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 Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last little while, news of OCZ leaving the computer RAM business completely by February 28 of this year has been spreading like wildfire on the internet. This announcement came after OCZ's statement in August 2010, when the company decided to withdraw from the unprofitable commodity memory market to focus on high performance enthusiast RAM instead. However, two weeks ago, news dawned upon us that even that move is no more. Being a major player in the solid state disk drive market (Not surprisingly, as it seems to me the OCZ Vertex 2 is the Honda Civic of the SSD world, except with Lamborghini performance), OCZ recently claimed 78% of their revenue came from SSDs in the past financial quarter. While we wish OCZ the best in their future ventures, it was a certainly a sad day for us upon hearing about this. I have personally witnessed OCZ's substantial growth back in the early 2000's. From their awesome marketing in widely popularizing the use of heatspreaders on high performance overclocking RAM when DDR1 RAM was still the standard and AMD Athlon 64s were the craze, to competitively priced high quality modules, OCZ have unquestionably won the hearts of many casual system builders and hardcore enthusiasts alike. I still remember their Special Ops Edition Urban Elite DDR2 with cool looking 'camo' heatspreaders, the epic Flex XLC that can be hooked up to your water cooling system, and my first ever set of DDR3 RAM, back when 2x1GB modules ran for $600 a kit. Before we wave goodbye to our long time friend, today we will publish what is probably our last OCZ RAM review on the Platinum XTE PC3-16000 2x2GB dual channel kit.
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Gigabyte GA-E350N-USB3 Fusion Motherboard
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The Gigabyte E350N-USB3 is one of the first motherboards with the E-350 chip, and while it is just a small mini-ITX-motherboard, it still has full support for USB3 and SATA 6 Gbps as well as a full-length PCI-E-slot. Fusion APU motherboards are slowly appearing at e-tail stores. For example, Newegg has the Gigabyte E350N-USB3 for $149.99, which is a very good price compared to Intel Atom/ION motherboards.
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OCZ RevoDrive 80GB
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We all know that SSDs can drastically increase system performance. In fact, here's a great idea: why not set up two SSDs in RAID, and get some great performance? In reality, there SATA 3Gbps bandwidth causes some limitations. Though most platter drives barely saturate SATA II, SSDs are fast enough that they approach, and can often exceed the throughput offered by SATA II's 3Gbps. The next generation SATA 6Gbps should alleviate this bottleneck, though the drive is still being limited to only 6Gbps of bandwidth, which can easily being saturated by SSDs once the storage manufacturers transition to 6Gbps bandwidth this year. This is where moving to a higher bandwidth such as PCI-E comes into play.
OCZ is trying to gain greater ground with their PCI-E based SSDs. In fact, those following the company know that it is shifting focus from system memory to solid state drives starting in 2011. Looking at OCZ's current product line up, we can see how serious OCZ is about this issue. A quick browse through the company's website shows that it has SSDs designed for almost every single segment of the market with controllers based on SandForce and Indilinx.
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HornetTek Showcase: An Updated Phantom
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About a year ago, we reviewed the HornetTek Phantom, a 2.5' multimedia player capable of playing almost anything we threw at it. The Phantom is a very nice unit. It has small footprint, and users simply have to install a 2.5' hard drive and they can play everything stored in it. Since 2.5' hard drives have yet to reach the same capacities as 3.5' drives, HornetTek has brought out another media player based on the same Sigma chip, but which now supports 3.5' SATA drives. With 3.5' mechanical hard drives selling at 5 cents per gigabyte, the upgrade is much-welcomed for anyone who has a large collection of digital media. The new media player, the Showcase, accommodates either 2.5' or 3.5' drives. Furthermore, it also adds the component video output for those who still have older TVs without HDMI ports.
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MSI Radeon 6870 HAWK review
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MSI is pre-overclocking this 1024MB HAWK model towards 930 MHz. And then there's the overclock potential, a new voltage regulation circuitry was embedded, allowing not only to play and tweak around with GPU voltages, nope ... they added voltage control for the memory and Auxilary/PLL voltage as well. We see a custom PCB with phase LEDs, voltage monitoring points, military class components and to put some icing on the cake, the all new TwinFrz III heatpipe cooler that is bound to bring good temperatures versus low noise levels.
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ECS A890GXM-A2 Motherboard
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"Surprisingly I was able to get the system to boot with a reference clock of 229MHz, but no more. I booted into the OS and figured I would give the ECS eOC program a shot to fine tune even further. I was able to use the utility to squeeze a few more MHz out of the system and still pass the benchmarks and stability tests. The final stable OC I was able to achieve was 4060MHz, which is a big improvement over past ECS boards I have tested. I was quite happy with this number for the overclocked tests."
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OCZ Technology RevoDrive 50GB PCI Express SSD
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The RevoDrive is a single expansion card that is effectively two SSDs (each with its own controller) coupled to an onboard RAID controller (configured in RAID 0) that uses a PCI Express interface to providing blazing fast transfer rates. The sample provided for review is a 50GB unit rated for quite impressive read speeds of up to 540MB/s and write speeds of up to 450MB/s.
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Gigabyte GTX560 Ti SOC
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Want a good value graphics card that's pushed as hard as it can be straight out the box? Enter the Gigabyte Super Over Clock series.
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Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1: Hands On
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“Microsoft has made Service Pack 1 for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 available to all of its customers. Not sure if you need them or not? It's not a very glamorous update, but consider that SP1 for Windows 7 includes under-the-hood updates to security and stability. There are a few service improvements within the desktop OS, but they're for very specific issues.”
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MSI R6870 Twin Frozr II OC
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HT4U.net has the pleasure of presenting another Radeon HD 6870 from MSI. The MSI R6870 Twin Frozr II OC is slightly overclocked and features the Twin Frozr II cooling solution on a mission to scare the competition.
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Zalman ZM-VE200 External HDD Case and Virtual Drive
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All hard drive enclosures are pretty much the same right? As long as they’re reliable, it’s really much more about the drive that you put inside, right? The new Zalman ZM-VE200 is trying to change that by offering a rather unique feature you’ll be hard pressed to find anywhere else: virtual drive functionality.
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Thermaltake Max 5G USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure Review
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“External hard drive enclosures have been around for quite a long time, I can always remember having one around to use as a backup or storage drive. With USB 3.0 becoming pretty much standard on all new motherboards new enclosures like Thermaltake’s Max 5G take advantage of the super fast speeds on USB 3.0. This new enclosure from Thermaltake features a super fast USB 3.0 connection, dual 80mm active cooling LED fans and support for SATA I, II and 6GB/s drives up to 2TB. Let’s take a look…"
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Cooler Master Storm Spawn 3500 DPI Gaming Mouse Review
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“Over the past year or two Cooler Master has been redefining gaming gear with the CM Storm line of products. One of their latest products is a smaller gaming mouse called the Spawn. The Spawn is wider and shorter than your typical gaming mouse and also has a low profile design. This third mouse on the CM Storm line is sure to fit the gamer who doesn’t like bulky mice. Read on further to read more about the Spawn’s unique ergonomic design."
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OCZ Vertex 2 120GB 3.5-inch Solid State Drive Review
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“OCZ has been one of the big players in the solid state drive market since the first consumer drives were available. We have seen them really push the technology to the limit over the past year, but they are also still concerned about you the customer. That is why they have released 3.5-inch versions of both their Vertex 2 and Agility 2 solid state drives. The 3.5-inch form factor means you do not need an adapter and OCZ claims this design is a lower cost per GB. Let’s take a look at this newly designed 3.5-inch version of the Vertex 2."
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EVGA GTX 560 Ti SC
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“EVGA is a company known for pushing high overclocks on their graphics cards and today's GTX 560 Ti Superclocked (SC) version is no exception. With some fantastic horsepower under the hood for the price, and coupled with a strong factory overclock, the EVGA GTX 560 Ti SC looks to offer a great product to gamers on a modest budget.”
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| The best Guides by the best writers on the internet; PCstats Beginners Guides explain computers, software, and all those other wonderful things that cause you frustration.
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Beginners Guides
