Daily Reviews Summary 04/02/11

A few weeks ago we reviewed the ADATA HM 650W Power Supply and it scored very well, offering a low price point with a modular design and great all round performance. Today we are looking at the big brother, the 1200W unit which is aimed at people with multiple graphics cards and high output demands.

The aesthetics may be slightly different from what we expect from Kingston, but the under the hood of the HyperX Genesis 4GB 2133MHz DDR3 kit the performance is the same. Testing on a Sandy Bridge system showed that this kit has the ability to offer high speed performance with minimal effort thanks to the plug and play nature of XMP profiles.

It has been a few years since Sapphire has put out a new motherboard. Here we are though, getting ready for a look at their first Intel motherboard since the days of the Intel Pentium 4! The Sapphire Pure Black X58 supports USB 3.0, SATA 6, and CrossfireX for starters! Is the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard going to be the right board for you? Read on to find out!

Sapphire isn't a new name when it comes to performance computer parts. Sapphire has been manufacturing AMD based graphics cards for a number of years already. Now Sapphire is making a move back to another segment of the enthusiast PC market, and they are poised to take it by storm. Which segment, you may ask? Well, Sapphire is now building enthusiast level motherboards. Today we have our first look at the first new motherboard put out by Sapphire since the days of the Pentium 4! They opted to build an Intel X58 chipset motherboard. For our first look at a Sapphire motherboard we will be taking a look at the Sapphire Pure Black X58 motherboard!

Thermaltake released one of the most stunning looking products in 2009, the spectacular Level 10 Chassis. Co-Designed with car manufacturer BMW it was a unique concept idea which caused many people to sit up and take notice. Sadly, the £500+ price point meant it was strictly for a small hard core audience of enthusiast user. Fast forward a couple of years and Thermaltake have revisited the design, dropping the price point while maintaining a similar compartmentalised design.

Prices of basic DDR3 memories have fallen down quickly in the past half-year. Nowdays you can get a 2x2GB 1333MHz dualchannel kit for less than 35€ from local store. Today we will take a look at Patriot G2 DDR3 1600MHz 2x2GB kit and see what extras you you can get out of it if you’re willing to spend couple more coins over the basic model. Let’s have a look!

Last year we reviewed the Thecus N4200 just days after its release. The N4200 is still to this day the only consumer NAS that offers dual status display screens, but more importantly, the only consumer NAS to include a battery backup system. When Thecus first marketed their N4200 a lot of emphasis was placed on the new dual display feature, but we felt that the battery backup feature was the real standout feature.

In an enterprise environment power is regulated to a degree unseen in our homes. Businesses regularly spend a portion of their budget on keeping clean, consistent power flowing to their servers. In our home power fluctuates and in many places across the country you can expect at least one power outage a year. Here in the Midwest where I'm at you can expect several brief outages in winter as ice builds on power lines and trees, and again in the spring when severe storms disrupt the flow. One of the easiest ways to take out a hard drive is to remove power abruptly without a proper shut down sequence.

It was at the very end of last year that Patriot Memory announced the commencement of a new series named Gamer 2 (G2 for short). This new series of memory, again, like many of our recent memory product reviews is focussed on the new Sandy Bridge platform. Apart from their attractive price-tag they also have a number of pleasing characteristics - they are extremely low profile, so much so that the heatspreaders are in fact shorter than themodules they cover. They are also said to give impressive performance figures too.