Daily Reviews Summary 02/07/09

Last week I took the BFG Tech MX 680w Power Supply out for a spin, which earned our Seal of Approval based on several different criteria. The unit was rock solid stable, silent, modular and would look great in most any system. But for the user on a budget or those not into hardcore gaming, the 680 watts offered is simply overkill. If you fall into this category, have no fear, as BFG Tech has something right up your alley, the MX 550w PSU. Virtually identical to its 680w bigger brother, the 550 unit we have on the test bench today is about $25 cheaper, money that could be put towards other hardware or simply stashed away for a rainy day. Will the smaller MX 550w be able to follow in the footsteps of the beefier 680 model?

The right piece of the headset has controls for powering the device as well as putting it in pairing mode. You also have buttons for skipping between audio tracks and pausing which worked very well in Windows Media Player as well as iTunes on my iMac and the Blackberry Bold. A volume control is also present on the headset but instead of changing your desktop/notebook's volume, it changes the headset's volume levels.

You could think of it as a DVD player without the optical DVD drive and a home theater PC without the full functionality of a computer. It really is just that - it doesn't come with any internal storage and sadly no Ethernet networking support, but it does include two hi-speed USB 2.0 ports, which allows you to hook up two external hard drives or USB flash drives which use a FAT32, NTFS or HFS+ (no journaling) file system.

The WD TV allows you to view photos, listen to music and watch movies on your TV. We have seen several devices like in this part, but none as good as this one. As for photos, WD TV supports JPEG, GIF, TIF/TIFF, BMP and PNG file formats. As for music, it supports MP3, WMA, OGG, WAV/PCM/LPCM, AAC, FLAC, Dolby Digital, AIF/AIFF and MKA file formats. As for movies, it supports MPEG1/2/4, WMV9, AVI (MPEG4, Xvid, AVC), H.264, MKV, MOV (MPEG4, H.264),MTS, TP and TS file formats. You will need to update your WD TV firmware to version 1.01 for all of these formats to be supported. Ours came already updated, so you may or may not need to depending on how long yours has been sitting around in the warehouse.

The 285GTX is a nice update of the 280GTX. Sure, the core is about the same as the GT200 found on the 280GTX but the card runs cooler and the newer manufacturing technology used for the GT200b chip gives us some more headroom in clock speeds.

Aside from a few issues, the Leadtek Limited WinFast GTX260 EXTREME+ is a very impressive video card. It provides strong performance in 3D games, it has the ability to handle any multimedia tasks with ease, and it is so quiet that it is well suited for use in just about any type of system. It could be the card to provide some gaming muscle to your desktop, LAN rig, or HTPC!

Shhh... Do you hear that? It's the Whisper by NZXT. Join Chris today as TechwareLabs takes a look at what is perhaps the quietest case on the market. Can the Whisper quietly live up to its name or will it run screaming on to the list of hypocrisy.

As Gaming Notebooks go, there are always going to be trade-offs to make and a balance to strike between performance, weight, and cost. The Asus G50Vt strikes a happy medium, weighing in at 7.5lbs and around $949 at retail outlets like Best Buy with higher-end SKUs online. Our system, powered by a Core 2 Duo P8400 at 2.26GHz and an NVIDIA GeForce 9800M GS, offered top-end multimedia performance and lots of gaming horsepower for all the latest titles. We'd gladly recommend this machine to anyone looking for a power desktop replacement or semi-portable notebook. Come on by the site and check it out...

The MyBook Studio Edition II from Western Digital is their brand new 2 terabyte portable hard drive that can be used to transport files, backup files, and share files among various computers, both PC and Mac. This device is specifically geared toward creative type of people, such as video editors or professional Photoshop users, but it can also be used for any other purpose as well. It has been designed for high-capacity and speed as well as providing a lot of connectivity options.