Daily Reviews Summary 01/25/11

We recently looked at one of Asus’ high end M4A90GTD Pro/USB3 motherboards that impressed us with its extensive feature set and strong performance. The only drawback of this board was the high price which put it out into the ‘deeper wallet’ category. So we were excited when Asus offered us a lower-end board that is a little more wallet friendly while retaining a good feature-set.

As a university student, I require a personal printer, and settled on a similar model from HP a few years ago after seeing one in action. These printers are small, uncomplicated, and offer little more than basic single-sided laser printing. In this way, they stay
inexpensive and provide a very good value. I have been using my HP P1006 for a few years and have been extremely happy. The HP P1102-W I will be reviewing resembles my older unit’s size and shape, but adds a wireless card and a darker color scheme.

You might wonder why we'd bother looking at the reference GTX 570 when we've already had a look at an option from Gainward which carried with it both an overclock and a new cooler. Well, the reason is simple - While the Gainward card is good, it doesn't offer the truest form of GTX 570, as it's got a bigger cooler, an overclock and a higher price tag. What it ends up doing is skewing everything for us and it makes it a little difficult to tell you exactly how one model compares directly against it.

So with the MSI reference design on offer, which is still the most popular design a month and a bit on since launch, we'll see how exactly the GTX 570 sits in our TPR and TVR graphs, while also seeing how it compares to other reference card offerings from AMD and NVIDIA.

The Lenovo IdeaPad U260 offers a minimal design that's geared towards business users, but it looks really for almost anyone. The 12.5-inch display has a 720p HD resolution and you get an HDMI port for high-definition output. There's decent, but not excellent performance, thanks to a slower hard drive.

We are testing today the Sentry LXE fan controller from NZXT, which has five channels, each one with an independent thermometer and able to control one fan, manually of automatically. Check it out!

What we liked about the P8P67 Deluxe: quite rich functionality, compact and efficient cooling system, convenient layout, high-quality CPU VRM, useful proprietary technologies and tools, good accessory bundle.