Daily Reviews Summary 04/16/11

Upper segment-motherboards have developed a tendency to look like space stations or Starcraft structures lately. If they don't, the basic presumption is that they must be cheap. Therefore, it was with a great deal of relief that we received a top-notch motherboard that looks moderate, while being replete with features. ASUS’ WS series, which is shortened for Workstation, targets users who find quality and stability to be the key features to any PC, while enabling the same PC to use its performance to the max on said motherboard. As the new series of Sandy Bridge CPUs has recently been introduced, it was only logical to expect ASUS to send a new WS motherboard our way as well

Today we have the Akasa DuoDock 2S hard drive docking station on our test bench which lets you hook up two hard drives to your machine via a USB3.0 interface. Both hard drive slots support both 2.5 and 3.5 hard drives, making this product as flexible as possible. We will also be taking a look at Akasas USB3.0 two-port ExpressCard notebook adapter which lets users add USB3.0 functionality to their laptop without significant cost.

The new TV-IP612WN Pan/Tilt/Zoom camera from TRENDnet features 10x optical zoom, which is very useful to get details of objects located at a high distance, 16x digital zoom and auto focus. It also comes with Wireless N support, WPS, an included monitoring software with motion detection, IPView Pro 2.0 which supports up to 32 cameras at once and a wall/ceiling mounting kit.

In the back and forth battle for the power users' heart, the Dell XPS x830-5215NBK wins the title of best Mainstream Multimedia desktop. It has a fairly high-end graphics card, plus a high-end second-generation Intel Core processor under its championship belt.

As an alternative to general purpose Windows or Linux servers, Promise SmartStor NSx7000 appliances have much to offer. They're well built, quick and very configurable, with lots of options beyond simple network storage sharing. The NAS market, however, is highly competitive and when it comes to configuration and management the Promise solution comes in second best. It does what it's supposed to, but others do it better and require far less technical expertise to fully exploit what NAS appliances like the SmartStor NSx700 have to offer.

Today we have one of the 320 Series SSDs connected to our test system and will find out what it offers and whether it can compete with its main competition, a SandForce based model of similar capacity, in a selection of real world and synthetic tests.

Not everyone wants to build their own HTPC, and despite the relative small size of most HTPC cases compared to a full tower for example, they're still fairly large next to most other electronic devices in a home theater environment. The Zotac Zbox on the other hand, is a fully functional HTPC in a very slim size; about the same as the average netbook. Offering a choice of barebone or pre-configured hardware, the model we have for review today includes the Intel Atom D525 dual-core CPU, nVidia ION2 graphics, 250Gb hard drive, 2Gb of memory and a slot-loading Blu-Ray drive. Add to that Gigabit wired and 802.11n wireless networking, 6-in-1 card reader, HDMI, USB3 and eSATA, and you've got a huge amount of functionality packed into one tiny device.