Daily Reviews Summary 08/30/11

I remember when I was in college and sometimes would try to decide on a computer upgrade or paying rent that month. Thanks to the stiff competition between AMD and NVIDIA there are a lot more choices today vs. back then. For those of you trying to stay on a very tight budget but would like some DirectX 11 goodness ZOTAC heeds your call with the ZOTAC AMP! GeForce GTX 550 Ti factory overclocked card. Legit Reviews pushes this $124.99 card to its limits on our test bench to see if you can have decent graphics in the sub $125 range.

We have to say that ZOTAC took an entry level graphics card and turned it into an attractive package with a dash of overclocking and silent cooling. While the ZOTAC AMP! GeForce GTX 550 Ti struggles to perform at its highest supported resolution it is not targeted for those users and is really meant for gamers running 1680 x 1050 resolutions and below...

Gigabyte has been on a winning streak lately to produce some of the nicest motherboards targeted at games. The Initial Killer/Sniper series has shown a completely new style from Gigabyte, a series that steps away from that baby blue color, towards a matte black PCB, a 'gun' theme, quality components and nifty extra's like a high-end Ethernet controller and even an integrated SoundBlaster X-Fi soundcard.

The Chaser MK-I has a solid SECC steel construction with the only pieces of plastic on it being the front and top panels. It includes a side panel window which is a must in its price range. It would have been nice however if they had included a side intake fan as that not only would have given you a total of three color shift LED fans but it probably would have greatly improved temperatures. It's great to see that ThermalTake designed the case so that it not only has a black coat of paint on the outside, but also features black paint on the inside. All things aside, this case definitely has it with watercooling capability.

I've said before that since the coolers included with retail CPUs are both quiet and effective at stock clock speeds, overclocking is the only reason anyone should buy a third party CPU cooler. Well, this isn't strictly true: not all third party CPU coolers are designed to handle ultra-high overclocks in massive tower systems; sometimes, what you need is a cooler that is more effective than the retail cooler in specific situations, such as the tight confines of a micro-ATX or HTPC case. When airflow's at a premium, a properly designed cooler that can fit into a tight space can be a big help. Benchmark Reviews looks at Cooler Master's new GeminII S524 cooler, which is designed for just such applications.

The Pure Platinum Z68 is the Sapphire's first entry for the Z68 chipset of Intel, which is capable of technologies such as Smart Response and Virtu. The Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 includes 4 DIMM slots with support of up to 16GB of RAM with speeds of up to 1600+MHz. For network connectivity, the Sapphire Pure Platinum Z68 has a Marvell chip controlled Gigabit LAN port and wireless capability via a Bluetooth 2.1 receiver. Storage options are many in the Pure Platinum Z68, with 8 total SATA ports; 4 SATA II with RAID 0,1,5,10 and AHCI controlled by the Z68 chipset, while there are 2 SATA III ports also controlled by the Z68 and the last 2 are controlled by Marvell's controller. Peripherals on the Z68 Pure Platinum are 2 USB 3.0 with up to 12 total USB 2.0 ports (including the USB headers), with 4 on the rear panel.

The Black Element seems to have incorporated many of the elements that have proven over time to be successful in the mouse market, combined with a refined design which has already seen quite an improvement since the first Tt eSports mouse.

The HyperX is the latest solid state drive from Kingston, using the name that made them famous from their vaunted memory products. It seems that Kingston is moving ahead in the game, away from the SSDNow moniker. This is fitting, as the HyperX drive sports the latest SandForce controller and promising massive performance increases from its predecessor and competitors.

With the feature-rich Intuos4 Medium Professional Pen Tablet the people over at Wacom have proven to us once again that they are not the best at what they do for well over 20 years by mere accident.

Recently we have reviewed quite a few Athlon and Phenom CPUs. It is always exciting to receive new hardware but we feel that these latest variations have been lacking on the innovation side of things. The new A-series APU changes all that!