Daily Reviews Summary 06/28/10

Fast cars and computer enthusiasts seem to go together quite nicely, so when we were given the chance to take a look at ‘motor mouse’ we couldn't say no. How can you go wrong with a 2.4GHz wireless mouse that is based on an iconic sports car? Read on to see what you get for $50 with the Motormouse!

The Motormouse 2.4GHz wireless mouse surprised us right off the starting line as we thought it would be a gimmicky product that would serve as a gag gift only. When pulled the Motormouse out of the box and started using it we quickly found out that the owners of Motormouse have brought a serious wireless mouse to the market. Not only was it fairly comfortable to use, but it also looks great and is a great conversation starter. Inside the box you'll find that the Motormouse comes with a a soft carrying pouch, with spare battery section inside, the 2.4GHz 19mm USB 2.0 receiver, two GP Alkaline AAA batteries, a basic owners manual, a 'Super-Glide mouse mat and of course the Motormouse...

Silverstone have been designing some of the industries most appealing chassis for the last decade and at KitGuru we were always fans of the Fortress and Temjin series. The Raven 02 in particular has been a favourite in our offices for the last year as it combines subtle and attractive design with class leading ‘vertical’ airflow. A large portion of our audience however want something more affordable and today our review product aims to fill this niche. The Precision SST-PS05 retails in the UK for around £40 including VAT and is sure to be of interest to the LAN gaming audience and people on a tighter budget.

The Lifebook S710 is like taking the engine of a Ferrari and sticking it on a Tida.

We test and review the HAF-X from Cooler Master. The HAF X rears its head marketed as the most powerful HAF (High Air Flow) chassis to date. An enthusiast targeted chassis that will keep your expensive components cooled down well, with a very user-friendly but extremely aesthetically pleasing design. To date each HAF and any HAF series chassis has proven to be extremely gratifying, has rugged looks and offers plenty of space for your hardware.

This new model is even compatible with USB 3.0 devices. You'll notice in the review that the chassis comes with dedicated support and cooling for graphic cards, excellent airflow with the help of up to four gargantuan fans.

The Intel Core i5 655K is a dual core, multithreaded CPU that is essentially just a regular chip but comes with a few significant exceptions. The first is that it has an unlocked multiplier, the Holy Grail of overclocking, allowing enthusiasts to push higher speeds. he second is a new core revision has also arrived on this chip, so more overclocking headroom should theoretically result. And lastly is the price tag, coming in about $210 USD, immensely cheaper than what we normally see on Intel chips with unlocked multipliers. So how fast can this chip go? Read on to find out.

Once I started pushing the card I was able to slide up to 990MHz stable with temperatures around 65 degrees. Even with that, I would consider this card to be a good overclocker, but where the v2 is special, is with the voltage tweak ability. Once I pushed that into effect, I bumped the voltage on the core to 1.349v and was able to get the card up to 1035MHz on the GPU and 1275MHz on the DRAM. Yes, a 5870 just hit over 1GHz stable, and only around 70 degrees! I expect some pretty awesome performance jumps in the OCC Benchmarks.

For improved sound on a tight budget, the Xonar DS is an excellent choice. With 7.1 channel sound and DTS support, it's a big step up from most onboard audio solutions.

Covering 422 desktop graphics cards, this comprehensive comparison allows you to easily compare 20 different specifications for each and every card. If you need to find out about the specification of any card, just come over and check out our Desktop Graphics Comparison Guide.

We hope it will prove to be a useful reference. We will keep this guide updated regularly so do check back for the latest updates.

Here are the latest updates in Revision 20.0 :
- Added the ATI Radeon HD 5890 graphics card.
- Updated the specifications of the ATI Radeon HD 5970 Eyefinity 6 graphics card.

Performance is often attributed to expensive objects of desire. In the automobile space, it's generally accepted that a higher performing vehicle will incur a significant markup over the average fuel-efficient family offerings. Computing is much the same. Retail OEM machines are pre-built at predetermined price points, often targeting the humble office/Internet-centric user. Performance isn't a primary concern for these systems, nor are upgradability or customisation. On the other hand, you have the expensive 'gamer' orientated machines which cost several thousands of dollars! This is where Benchmark Reviews steps in. We've sat down and created three enthusiast machines without the dreaded price gauge of many pre-built setups - the 'Enthusiast PC Build' for Q3 2010!

Today I’ve got another phone for review the Kyocera S2300 from Common Cents Mobile that is a fairly new service provider but it’s actually a subsidiary of Sprint. Common Cents is a non-contract company, or pay-as-you-go basically, but what’s special and unique about them is that they round down instead of rounding up. An example would be that if you make a call that lasts 1 minute and 46 seconds, you only pay for 1 minute instead of 2 minutes like the other providers will charge you for. The actual phone resembles a BlackBerry with a full QWERTY keyboard, but it’s not quite as powerful or fast really. It’s honestly a fairly basic phone with a few features here and there that we’ve seen on other phones.

Today I will be looking at Thermaltake's latest gaming mid tower, the Armor A90. If you are familiar with Thermaltake cases, you will see that this case is a hybrid between two of their product lines, it is in the VL9000 series so it has the superior cooling qualities of the V9 but is also part of the Armor series so it has some really aggressive styling to make your rig stand out at LAN parties. And of course you can expect the ruggedness you always find in Thermaltake cases. Read on to check out the Armor A90!

Kingston recently introduced an addition to its HyperX line of memory called ‘HyperX blu’. This memory is meant for entry level gamers and PC enthusiasts, which to menas means it’s more of a ‘value’ line but yet offer the performance you’ve come to expect from HyperX. I can tell you though that the blu performs just as well as the regular style HyperX and just costs a little less. The kit I have for review today is the Kingston HyperX blu 1600Mhz 2×2gb kit that runs at Cas 9 on Intel XMP settings at 1.65v. So I’ve put it up against two other HyperX kits, a standard kit that runs @1600 and the LoVo kit that runs @1866 for comparison. I also did some overclocking of course and this kit hit 2000Mhz very easily, a very respectable and stable overclock. Read on and see for yourself how it
performs..