Daily Reviews Summary 04/20/12

We review the ASUS GeForce GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP. The benefits of that big cooler are plentiful though, this is a product that you will not hear whilst retaining really good temperatures, yeah it works pretty darn well in both performance and silence really.

The card's base clock frequency is set higher at default for you, at 1137 MHz with a dynamic turbo that on our sample clocks up-to 1267 MHz. The memory runs stock at 6000 MHz though. Not only will we show the performance of the GeForce GTX 680 ASUS DCU II TOP -- we'll throw in the results for the NV GeForce GTX 680, GeForce GTX 680 GBT OC, GeForce GTX 680 MSI TwinFrz III OC and GeForce GTX 680 Palit JetStream as well.

Although Intel's die shrink of Sandy Bridge isn't due until next week (Monday, rumors say), the company has long shipped Ivy Bridge's accompanying chipsets. It might seem odd to jump the gun on "next-gen" motherboards, but 7-series platforms are backwards compatible with Sandy Bridge processors, so users have actually been able to buy a Z77 motherboard and use it for a few weeks without Ivy Bridge.

After surveying Panther Point's spec sheet, we're itching to get a little more hands-on. Fortunately, we have four new Z77 motherboards in the shop and begging for attention, including the Asrock Z77 Extreme6, ECS Z77H2-AX, Gigabyte Z77X-UD5H-WB and Intel DZ77GA-70K.

Hot off the heels of our LSI MegaRAID review, Chris is back with a look at the Areca 1882i RAID controller.