Daily Reviews Summary 02/21/12

When Cooler Master released the Cosmos case a few years ago it was truly something new and revolutionary. They followed it up with the Cosmos S, which gave it a more streamlined look and took away the front door. Our own staff member Colin Dean still uses that case to this day. Back in 2011 at CES we saw a prototype of the new Cosmos that Cooler Master was going to release later in the year. We were excited, but we had no clue when it was going to be released. Right before CES this year Cooler Master announced the Cosmos II. A massive case with support for up to 13 hard drives, 5 included fans with support for up to 10 fans, 2 hot swap hard drive bays, and it can fit motherboards up to XL-ATX. Read on as we check this beast out!

Everything USB is pleased to announce our latest review on HighPoint RocketU 1144A 4-port USB 3.0 Card.

Upgrade to USB 3.0, they said. You'll get 5Gbit/s, they said. Gah, if only that were indeed the case. Between the bottlenecks of a PCIe x1 interface and shared controller design, most expansion cards are ill-suited for serious storage needs. Thankfully, there is an alternative in sight. Today I'll take a look at the one 4-port USB 3.0 card that doesn't have either bottleneck, the HighPoint RocketU 1144A. One host bus adapter to rule them all? Read on to find out...

Verdict:
The HighPoint RocketU 1144A 4-port USB 3.0 card has more bandwidth than we could possibly hope to make use of at an affordable price but is otherwise limited by incompatibilities for non-storage devices.

Pros:
+ PCIe 2.0 x4 interface (15Gbps)
+ Dedicated USB 3.0 controller per port
+ Windows and Linux support
+ Simple installation

Cons:
- Incompatible with some non-storage devices
- Ports inadequately spaced for some flash drives
- Lacks BIOS boot support

"The new Radeon HD 7770 (a.k.a. "Cape Verde XT") is a mainstream graphics chip based on the latest graphics architecture from AMD, dubbed "Graphics Core Next" or simply "GCN," which supports the new PCI Express 3.0 connection and the latest DirectX version (11.1). Let's see how the Super Overclocked Edition from XFX fared in our tests.