Budget Sub-$150 Solid State Drive Round-up

Recently there has been a surging demand for solid state drives that sacrifice space for speed and more affordable price tags, and manufacturers have been racing to deliver just that. Most of the drives featured in this round-up offer 32GB - 40GB capacities, while a few others top out at 64GB. As limiting as a 32GB drive might appear, they can still be extremely useful in enhancing a PC's performance when set to run as the boot drive. These smaller drives can also accommodate for select programs where they can greatly speed up the use of the application, for example, Adobe Photoshop.

Today's round-up is comprised of the following contenders: OCZ Agility 2 40GB ($135), OCZ Vertex 2 40GB ($124), OCZ Onyx 64GB ($130), OCZ Onyx 32GB ($85), ADATA S596 Turbo 32GB ($83), Intel X25-V 40GB ($100), and the Kingston SNV425-S2 64GB ($125). In addition to these affordable SSD offerings we have added to the mix the Seagate Momentus XT ($135), a highly-touted hybrid drive that attempts to deliver the best of both worlds by offering huge storage capacity at a reasonable price, with the added performance boost of NAND flash memory for caching data.

We'll be putting each drive through a set of tests including four synthetic benchmark programs plus our own file copying and load time tests.

We test and review the Thermalright HR-02 CPU cooler. Thermalright introduces this product as a passive CPU Cooler. The HR-02 is the second revision of the legacy Thermalright HR-01 cooler.

We'll test it passively cooled yet we'll also pair it with Thermalright's TY-140 fan, a 1300 RPM fan that is silent, yet high performing. As stated, the results stunned me, this is really really good stuff.

While we have often focused on small capacity Solid State Drives today we thought it would be interesting to have a look at the 512GB SSDNowV+ Kingston drive aimed at the enthusiast audience with specific demands for the highest levels of storage capacity.

Asus's ROG (Republic of Gamers) series motherboards have an unparalleled reputation within the overclocking community and their Rampage III Extreme motherboard is no exception to this. Based on Intel's X58 Express and ICH10R chipsets and updated for support of USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s technology, this ATX board is ready to push any Intel LGA1366 Core i7 processors to its very limits when overclocked.

Every so often a memorable motherboard spends some time on my desk. Past boards include the original ASUS X48 Rampage Extreme, the EVGA X58 E760 Classified, and the Gigabyte P45 EP45-UD3R. Each of these boards was notable for its overclocking potential; the REX was the king of LGA775, the Classified is a top candidate for king of LGA1366 and the EP45-UD3R made a mockery of other boards in pushing DDR2 to stratospheric levels. I feel the Rampage III Extreme combines the overclocking potential of the Classified with the ease of overclocking that the original REX provided...

Whether you’re looking for AMD or Intel cooler this cooler fits all! Well, not all exactly, but it’ll definitely fit into any latest sockets from AMD or Intel. GlacialTech was kind enough to send us their new Igloo Alaska from multi-platform series.