Daily Reviews Summary 03/10/07

Microsoft's Vista has been out well over a month now, time for a much needed closer look, what's the current state of affairs?

Do you happen to own a HTPC enclosure without a fancy LCD display and are perhaps lacking a MCE remote control, or you just want a fancy display on your current enclosure? Well, the folks over at SilverStone have a solution to that problem and it's the MFP51.

We have been gaming away at high resolutions and quality settings to find you the best deal for the newly release Geforce 8800 GTS 320Mb card. We compare models from known manufacturers Sparkle, Gainward, XFX and PNY as well as two new comers Twintech and Zotac. Which one offers the most bang for the buck? Read on to find out.

As a far as a pure multimedia solution goes the Claro is superior to Creative's X-Fi. Not only is it better in terms of the actual quality of headphone and surround sound, it's also better from a software point of view, too. If you spend more time gaming than watching TV on your PC, the X-Fi is the undisputed choice. The X-Fi does EAX 3.0-5.0 and offers far more package variations that include extras like break out boxes and 5.25" bay adapters for extra port varieties and inputs.

Obviously, better speakers or headphones will do probably just as much for your audio experience, but you have to balance the cost of both. It should be an obvious complement considering the money often shelled out on graphics cards, CPUs, memory and monitors these days. If you're just after a plain soundcard to listen to music and video, the Claro will do far more for your audio experience than an X-Fi. Heavy gamers need not apply though.

XFX recently took the 7600 GT to a new level by introducing the fastest factory clocked 7600 GT video card yet. They teamed up with Fatal1ty to create this XFX 7600 GT Fatal1ty Professional Series card. There are several companies that have done this in the past like Abit, Creative, and Zalman. The XFX 7600 GT Fatal1ty card comes in with a 650Mhz core clock, and a 1.6 Ghz memory clock straight out of the box.

This tutorial is for people that are willing to replace their CPU by a faster one but don’t have a clue on what CPUs their system supports. In this tutorial we will list all CPU models you can install on your system without replacing your current motherboard.

Although there is a great assortment of hard disk enclosures in the market today, the major issue that exists between the different models from various manufacturers is not necessarily just limited to performance and price -- the excessive competition already regulates this well enough. However, one very prominent problem that we've seen so far is compatibility. IDE enclosure? No SATA compatibility. USB or eSATA? Loud fan? Whoa... slow down, we'll need to solve all that one by one. Or do we? Let's check out Thermaltake's new Silver River DUO enclosure today -- the enclosure that supports both PATA and SATA for internal interfaces, with eSATA and USB for the external connection.