Daily Reviews Summary 06/11/07

With surround sound being more popular than ever before, the demand for sound cards that can handle a 7.1 speaker setup is quite high. Everyone wants to be immersed into their music, games, and movies. So what is a better way to do that than get the big 7.1 speaker home entertainment system? In order to use that entertainment system, you'll need a sound card that can handle the system and put out the sound you desire to hear. Turtle Beach's Montego Dolby Digital Live (DDL) card is the first 7.1 sound card released from Turtle Beach. Let's see how it performs when it's put to the test of an avid gamer, musician, and movie-goer.

eVGA has released numerous motherboards in the past two
years, but we are going to take a look at their most recent top offering, the nForce 680i SLI. Coming from a company who knows how to cater to enthusiasts, will the board leave us impressed like their graphics cards do?

Power supplies have finally reached that golden 1000W range. At CES we saw many different companies unveil their 1000W power supplies. Finally we have got our hands on one from Thermaltake. The Thermaltake Toughpower 1000W power supply is quad GPU ready, has a nice big 140mm fan, and is modular with 6 PCI-E connectors, and 8 SATA connectors. So this power supply is ready to tackle almost any high performance system that is thrown at it, let's take a look.

Overclockers with SLI systems will appreciate the stability and power as they push their dual and quad core processors to their limits on top of enjoying exceptional graphics performance. Ultimately, the Tagan Team has done a fine job of building a quality, dependable 1000 watt power supply...

First impressions are good. In format it's very similar to the Q1: slightly bigger, but still highly portable. It's about the size of a large-format paperback book, with a seven inch, 800 x 480 touch-sensitive screen on one side, surrounded by a number of thumb-operated controls.

It looks reasonably smart too, mimicking the Q1's glossy finish, and feels very solidly built with no rattles or creaks apparent in the chassis. The number of fiddly buttons have been kept to a minimum, and this helps the 701 maintain a sleek, uncluttered look.

Now I’m looking at the direct descendant of the Q30, the originally named Q40. At first glance, this Q40 looks exactly the same as the Q30 from over two years ago, but Samsung has not been resting on its laurels. First up, I should mention that this is an ultra-portable notebook in the true sense of the word, which means that there is no integrated optical drive.

With the release of the Company of Heroes 1.70 patch at the end of last month, we were also treated to a new beta Windows Vista driver set from NVIDIA, promising impressive performance improvements to coincide with the release of that update. While better performance in Company of Heroes is a given, what of the other recently released DirectX 10 content? In this article, we'll be putting this recently released ForceWare 158.45 beta to the test under Windows Vista, using a trusty GeForce 8800 GTS.