Daily Reviews Summary 08/15/10

On July 9th 2010, Arctic Cooling launched the Arctic Sound S111, their very first 2.0 speakers. These speakers are marketed mainly towards laptop users. Not only are they compact and portable, the Arctic Sound S111 seeks to enhance the overall multimedia experience by offering better sound quality over the stock speakers of the laptop.

Seeing as they are USB-powered, the Arctic Sound S111 speakers should not add to cable clutter because they do not require an AC adapter. According to Arctic Cooling, pairing these speakers with a USB power supply, such as the Arctic C1 Mobile, would make an excellent sound system for the person on the go.

For the most part, Bluetooth headsets all seem to offer a similar set of features. However, Motorola’s newest headset, the H17txt brings something new to the table; the ability to read text messages to the user as soon as they are received. With more and more states restricting texting and cell phone usage while driving, it only makes sense for a feature such as text to speech to be added to a Bluetooth headset.

We’ve previously reviewed motherboards based on AMD’s 880 and 890 chips, and now the time has come to take a look at 870, which, as its name suggests, presents us with the weakest variant of AMD’s new generation chip. Biostar’s TA870+ motherboard uses the SB850 southbridge in conjunction with this chip, therefore integrating native 6 Gbps support, but (as we know from previous tests) has no USB 3.0 ports. Biostar decided not to include them via a separate controller, which helped retain the price on an acceptably low level. The 870 chip itself contains no graphics core, and its consumption should be around 13 W…

When I was a kid, I wanted to play all these coin operated games but my parents didn't let me. From there on since I've wanted to build an arcade gaming cabinet. Now that I have the technical skills and financian means, why not?!

Today we are looking at the Corator DS from Coolink, a company perhaps not recognised by many enthusiast users. They are the retail arm of Rascom who are involved with Noctua, one of KitGuru’s favourite cooling companies. The heatsink we are reviewing is a dual tower design that utilises Gapless Direct Touch technology with four large 8mm heat pipes transfering heat to aluminum fins. Today we are going to compare it against the similarly priced Thermaltake Frio and the top of the line cooler from Noctua, the NH D14 ‘Austrian Sandwich’.