Daily Reviews Summary 03/14/09

You read it right, ST .. not to confuse with STX.

The PC audio market has been churning out some great new high fidelity soundcards lately. A good example here is the recent release of the new Essence STX headphone card, which stirred up the audio community and caught the attention of people who usually look for external headphone amplifiers. Some of you may know there were rumors of ASUS expanding the Essence Line-up with possibly a PCI model.

Guru3D has the prototype the engineering sample of the Essence ST in our audio lab today, and will bring you a sneak preview on it to show you what ASUS is working on inside that chocolate factory of theirs.

At first glance the Cisco media hub appears to be just another NAS device like so many on the market, however as the name suggests this is aimed mainly at the media market with the focus on delivering music or video based files to other devices.

In the gaming peripheral market, Microsoft has been getting some positive press with the Sidewinder line of mice and keyboards. They have recently released their latest mouse =96 the Microsoft Sidewinder X8. The Sidewinder X8 is the premier model in their gaming line of mice.

Up on the review block today I've got the OCZ Rally2 32GB Flash Drive, being 32gb obviously there's a lot of room for your stuff, and we've al l got stuff, we've got stuff everywhere, we've got stuff with our stuff, and the Rally2 will hold a lot of our stuff. Sometimes we need a larger place for our stuff, the stuff we have on those other USB drives is piling up, and making us delete some of our stuff to make room for more stuff, but the Rally2 can alleviate that problem and allow you to put more stuff on it, 32gigs of stuff to be exact. So read on to learn more about a better place to put your stuff

Video cards these days are just as powerful in some applications as the main processor in today’s top end systems and all this power comes at a cost of generating large amounts of heat. Most of the stock coolers are barely sufficient to keep these top end cards cool under the most ideal circumstances. Put them in a crowded cluttered chassis and you’re just asking for heat related problems.

The ATi HD4870 is no exception to this rule. Under load, the GPU temp can easily reach upwards of 80 degrees centigrade and hotter in a closed case. When I was asked to take a look at XSPC’s new Razor full coverage GPU water block for my MSI HD4870 factory overclocked card, I jumped at the chance because I’ve already been getting great results from an other full coverage cooler on my Sapphire HD4870 factory overclocked card.

So let’s get on with this review and see just how well the two water blocks compare performance wise to each other. It’ll be interesting, to say the least.

The Cooler Master V10 CPU cooler is said to be capable of dissipating over 200 Watts of heat generated by processors, which makes it one of the most powerful coolers money can buy. With ten 6mm heat pipes, a TEC (Thermo-Electric Cooling), and two cooling fans this CPU cooler looks like it should cool any processor with no problems! Read on to see how it performs with an Intel Core i7 and Core 2 CPU.

Could Western Digital's new digital media player be the ideal companion for the company's external hard drives? And does it belong in your entertainment center?

A returning question on many enthusiast discussion forums is which Intel CPU to choose for your S775 setup, the high end E8600 or the more budget friendly 7 series? We take a closer look at the advantages of the E8600 and its 6Mb L2 cache, versus the more affordable E7400 with only 3Mb L2 cache, which one offers the best bang for the buck? Read on to find out.

Data Crow is an open source java application pioneered by Robert Jan van der Waals. The program is simply an array of modules that each allows you to store information about a myriad of media types, the best thing is you'll do minimal typing. The software fetches online databases like Amazon and IMDB to download the information pertaining to your search, so if you want to add the movie Transformers to your database, all you would do is select the correct media, country, and search. Once the item appears you simply add it to your collection. If your brother asks you loan him the movie, that's simple too. Simply look up the movie and check it out, Voila! Among those features are many others so don' forget to download the program and try it or yourself.

The latest product of Nvidia's renaming spree is the GTS 250, previously known as the 9800GTX+. Is this just another ploy by Nvidia to push old parts on unsuspecting consumers?

Lately, external hard drive docks have become a popular accessory, specifically the open form factor ones that allow quick swapping of the media in the dock. The Kingwin EZ-Dock is a medium to low cost option with all of the features of the more expensive models.