Daily Reviews Summary 07/08/10

USB 2.0 is most popular due to wide compatibility but transfer speeds are slow in today's standard. Other options like FireWire, eSATA and the recently introduced USB 3.0 offer much more bandwidth but of course many computers don't support these various interfaces. Until now, the tradeoff has been speed versus compatibility. But with Seagate's new FreeAgent GoFlex portable hard drive, you can get the best of both worlds. The GoFlex drive ships with a standard USB 2.0 interface but what makes this drive unique is the ability to remove the interface and replace it with a complete different interface.

The progress made in the design and implementation of CPU coolers over the last few years has been little short of amazing. While both Intel and AMD provide perfectly adequate coolers with their boxed retail CPUs, enthusiasts will want to consider a third-party CPU cooler for their rigs from both performance and styling standpoints. Overclocking your CPU mandates something better than the stock cooler, and if you've a windowed case, looks don't hurt either. Cooler Master was founded to produce advanced cooling products, and in this review Benchmark Reviews looks at the latest in their line of "V" coolers, the Cooler Master V6GT (model RR-V6GT-22PK-R1).

The Corsair AX1200 power supply is one of the most efficient power supplies I have tested for OCC, but it gets better. The DC output voltage load regulation was almost perfect with all the rails maintaining their voltage within a 20mV window from zero to full load, whilst keeping ripple/noise levels well within the permitted levels. The Corsair AX1200 power supply could be the best power supply in this class at the moment and it will take some beating.

We have no doubts about Prolimatech's renowned reputation for top cooling products, but the Samuel 17 is a different breed since it's not designed for absolute killer overclocking performance. It will be interesting to see if it can live up to its moniker, reflecting the David and Goliath story from the Bible. Can this little cooler succeed?

Back in March while attending CeBIT ASUS were showing off a rather interesting looking card from the same team which designed their limited edition MARS cards from 2009. This new, unreleased card was based on Radeon technology and was essentially designed to take the 5000 series architecture as far as it could go. Today, 4 months later, we finally get the chance to see what the ASUS engineers can do when tasked with creating a product aimed at consumers who want the most unique Radeon money can buy.

We will be combining the ARES with a Core i7-980X overclocked to 4.25GHz and running it through a selection of real world tests including gaming and Blu-Ray 3D playback to find out how well it compares to the standard 5970 and 2x480 in SLI.

Even though this was our first test of an SSD featuring a SandForce controller, our expectations were high given the buzz seen elsewhere on the web. OCZ Technology's 50GB Vertex 2 solid state drive featuring an optimized SandForce SF-1200 controller did not let us down, with testing presenting results close to the impressive published specifications.