Daily Reviews Summary 01/05/08

It's Antec. Antec is best-known for its cases, but its power supply business is growing immensely because of units such as the focus of this review, the TruePower Quattro 1000W Power Supply Unit. This race-car themed stallion of a power supply delivers a keen 1000W to an enthusiast's innards. Its four 12V rails are adequate to power just about anything thrown at it. Prepared to be jolted by this review.

With the trend of computer peripherals and console controllers moving towards the wireless end of the spectrum and away from the wires, they still have to be powered by the means of a battery. While some manufacturers choose a custom battery pack/module like the Logitech G7, a vast majority of these wireless devices are powered by the common AA battery. For those devices that do not come with a way to recharge themselves, USBCells from Moixa Energy seeks to provide a rechargeable solution that doesn't require a separate battery charger but instead uses USB ports to recharge. Read on for the full review.

The Zerotherm Nirvana NV120 is a fantastic cooler that outperforms much of the competition between the very quiet to silent fan lower speeds. And, although it is technically the best performing heatsink we have seen to date, we'd never recommend using it at full speed.

On the other hand, the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme is a product that really does deserve its eXtreme branding and the hype surrounding this product is deserved. Without a doubt, it is /the/ CPU cooler to own at the moment and it's the next best thing you're going to get without plunging into the realms of watercooling -- even though it's very expensive for an air cooler, it's still good value in the grand scheme of things. But a 3?C difference over that of the next best cooler we'd buy might not be worth the significant extra investment to some people.

Its installation might be awkward and the fan mounting it just atrocious, but once that momentary stress is passed it doesn't matter because its build quality is fantastic and you'll have a truly silent setup that can handle just about /anything/ you'll throw at it. If you're looking for the ultimate CPU cooler, make it your mission to own the Thermalright Ultra 120 eXtreme.

The core of any TV tuner is the chip that is designed to receive the signal. Currently, there are various chips that are designed to receive different signals. If you have purchased a TV tuner two years ago, you are most likely to have a card that only receives analog signal. Lately, the newer tuner card comes with digital tuner receivers which receives DVB or ATSC transmissions. Many newer and more expensive tuners even come with both tuners (combo) where users are able to receive both signals. A combo tuner is different from hybrid tuner. A combo tuner can receive both digital and analog together to allow users to watch TV coming from both signals while a hybrid tuner can only receive one or the other.

AMD (ATI) was the leader in the PVR with their All-in-Wonder graphic card (where a powerful graphic card that function as both a gaming card and PVR). Unfortunately, AMD has decided to abandon any further development of All-in-Wonder all together and focusing on gaming graphic cards. Luckily, AMD has not totally abandoned their development of multimedia add-on cards as their hardware can be considered as some of the best. Their latest TV Wonder 650 line-up has combined many proven technologies into one of the arguably best TV tuner card found on a consumer desktop. Today, we will take a look at one of the best of the bunch, courtesy of VisionTek—The VisionTek TV Wonder 650 PCIe.

Removable flash drives have become very popular due to their flexibility, usefulness, and increasing storage capacity. Options for users seeking to secure the data on such devices have been limited to encryption until now. Today we take a look at the Corsair Padlock which employs a form of hardware security which helps assure that even if you lose your drive, you won't lose control of your data.

The Turbo Charge TB550 Portable Cell Phone Charger is a gadget designed to make sure your mobile phone always has enough power. Whether you can't reach the wall charger, can't find the car charger, or are lost in the middle of nowhere in desperate need of help, this device will take the power from two AA batteries and provide several full charges for a large selection of today's popular phones.

The Patriot Memory DDR3-1333 had a good amount of headroom for the stock settings. If you're dying to enter the DDR3 game but don't have a lot of cash to your name, this wouldn't be a bad place to start. DDR3 is still very expensive regardless of whom you buy from, but building a new machine around DDR3 will delay future upgrading... at least for a little while.

Today we've got another CPU cooler up on the review block, been doing a lot of those lately, and I just got another one in for review yesterday... Anyway, the cooler I have for review today is one that many people have been talking about all over the internet, it's one that those same people and others have been waiting for its' arrival with baited breath and sweet anticipation, it's the Scythe Ninja Copper Anniversary Model CPU Cooler, and yeah... it's all that! So, I don't think anymore introduction is needed.... hit it.

It's easy to see where Dell was going with the introduction of their new UltraSharp 3008 WFP 30" LCD display. Calling upon the input received from previous 30" panel incarnations and marrying these feature requests in with new technologies like a wider color gamut and the bleeding-edge of display interface technologies. As the first DisplayPort-enabled LCD available from Dell, the 3008 WFP is claiming that sexy is back. No Justin, not you -- she's getting a Dell?

OCZ has put together a very interesting 4GB DDR2 memory kit, namely because these modules feature heatpipes and a large aluminum fin heatsink. The ReaperX HPC heatsink system draws heat way from the DDR2 BGA DRAM Modules, allowing system airflow to do all the work silently. The OCZ PC2-6400 ReaperX HPC Enhanced Bandwidth dual channel memory kit is 4GB in capacity, and it retails for a competitive price. This 4GB kit of PC2-6400 memory kit operates at DDR2-800 speeds with timings of 4-4-3-15.

There's a lot to like about Corsair's new Dominator XMP 1800 MHz DDR3 modules. Just in terms of raw speed, the amount of memory bandwidth that DDR3-1800 offers is amazing. We would really like to see the timing issue addressed though for the XMP profiles -- if 7-7-7-20 was indicated then having the system run at 9-9-9-24 is a downer. Looking past that, the Intel XMP standard does in fact make the memory overclocking world easier and more accessible to users that are not comfortable addressing multipliers and timing settings.

First, I must admit that I have a hard time not comparing the LG Voyager VX10000 to the iPhone. I've owned an iPhone for six months and am very happy with it, but to be blunt, the two phones shouldn't be compared directly. The iPhone is more expensive, $100-200 more than the VX10000, and isn't available on the Verizon network. The best feature of the phone is the Verizon V-Cast mobile TV. It's fairly expensive at $15/mo, but having eight channels of TV at your disposal is pretty sweet, and I was usually able to find something to watch between ESPN, Comedy Central and NBC News. The biggest flaw with this phone (and it's not the only phone with this problem) is that the touch screen is more of a gimmick than an honest to goodness feature. It's as if it's added on to compete with that other phone rather than be a useful feature.

The Zalman CNPS9700NT follows in the footsteps of the popular CNPS9700 LED heatsink, and it's just as big as the latter. What sets the CNPS9700NT apart is a 100mm Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) compliant fan - making this heatsink a more attractive choice for Intel platforms than the pervious version and its manual fan speed controller. Oh, and did we mention it's chrome plated an evil Terminator-grey shade of silver? Blame nVidia for that one, personally we prefer our heatsinks in bare aluminum or copper.

Lancool Metal Boned K7 Case has an aluminum outside, but a steel body. This is an excellent combination because the aluminum reduces weight looks fantastic, while the steel body ensures strength. It has 3x120mm fans,1x3.5" drive bay and 3x5.25" drive bays, 5 HDD bay cage, removable motherboard tray, cable management system and more. This case is an example of what to look for in a mid-tower case. Watch the video to find out more and check out the bloopers at the end.

The Seagate 1TB drive swept all the other drives in the HD tune benchmark and took two out of four in the Sandra benchmark, which gives an overall total of about 80% in the win column. The 1 TB Barracuda is a second generation perpendicular recording drive, hence the 7200.11 as opposed to the 7200.10 that the 750GB Barracuda, so this could possibly be the reason why it does a little better than its little brother. Or could it be that my 750GB drive is starting to wear down a little considering the punishment I've put it through.

Ho Ho Ho! We hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year, and if you have bought yourself a new Radeon based graphics card over the holiday period there is no doubt you want to see if it’s worth jumping to the newer Catalyst 7.12 driver suite.

Let’s not delay as we have some performance improvements promised which you can see mentioned in the release notes.