Daily Reviews Summary 09/16/08

On the review block today I've got the Wicked Lasers Elite Series 125 Plus, it's a green laser that is just amazing, one of those things that you have to see for yourself to believe. The quality of the Elite Series 125 Plus is excellent, holding it in your hand you can feel the care that went into the design and production of it, looking at it closely you can see it is flawless in it's creation. In the following review I've got a few pictures for you and several videos as well showing the Elite 125 in action, as a bonus Wicked Lasers also sent me a pair of Laser Shades, so I'll be taking a quick look at those too.

The Raidmax IceCube is considered to be the mini version of the Raidmax IceBerg. The Raidmax IceCube is a SFF (Small Form Factor) case basically designed to be a LAN party case.

AMD's release of the 780G chipset introduced the world to motherboards capable of much more than consumers had previous enjoyed. Sapphire's PURE 780G brings us a unique board which Ruffy Rios tests. Does the PURE 780G perform and give you expandability? Read our review to find out.

The BFG GeForce 9600 GT OCX takes mid-range graphics up a few notches by cranking up both the memory and GPU clock speeds over NVIDIA's GeForce 9600 GT reference spec, while coupling a potent cooling solution with intelligent temperature management for maximum stability and performance. Head on over to the site and check it out...

Xigmatek are a relatively new company mostly getting a great reputation for their proficient cooling solutions. Lately however Xigmatek has made a great foray into the power supply sector with units having extreme specifications and aggressive prices. Today we will take a look at their most powerful PSU, the NRP-HC1501 1500W.

Today we are looking at one of the slickest PC cases to hit the market in a long time. The case is from Lian Li and is called the PC-X500. As you expect when you hear the Lian Li name, the case is of top quality. The Lian Li PC-X500 is a fantastic case, which cost more than some low-end complete PCs or notebooks at over $350. For some people that amount of money will seem like serious overkill. For the gamer looking for the ultimate PC chassis for their high-end gaming system, the Lian Li PC-X500 may be just the ticket.

Today we have the chance to look at the Icy Box IB-3218 external enclosure. What makes this enclosure different from so many others? Well his enclosure supports two SATA hard drives across a single USB 2.0 cable unlike many that only have room for one. Our thanks go out to Tagan for providing us with this review sample; they also make some interesting cases and power supplies. The contents consist of the Icy Box enclosure, backup software, driver CD, a USB cable, a small external power supply and a rather limited manual. The CD offers a USB driver for those users still stuck in Windows 98 world along with FNet PCClone EX Lite backup software.

Installation was very straight forward we just had to remove two screws from the bottom of the unit so that the internals could slide out and house our SATA hard drive. The unit will support two drives but for our testing we only had one drive available to us. The drive just slides into place and connects to the provided ports for power and data transfer. The image that follows shows a drive in the tray, and where to secure the drive by using two screws on each side of the drive.

You don't need to spend a fortune for a high quality, multiple-use stereo headset. That is, according to TekNmotion, makers of the Yapster Gaming Headset. Yapster was designed for a large audience of users ranging from everyday online computer uses such as PC gaming, internet chat, VOIP or simply high quality stereo music.

One drawback to the design is the exhaust fan positioned on the bottom of the unit really cuts the airflow down for no good reason. I would like to see future attempts with a smarter placement of the exhaust fan. Now let's get into the numbers. The Thermaltake Vi-on beat a lot of the other scores by quite a bit and fell behind on a couple but still did very well in the long run. If the decision comes down to looks and performance when it comes time to spend your hard earned dollars, usually performance is the winner; consider this, the Thermaltake VI-ON has both looks and performance. I would recommend the Thermaltake Vi-on for anyone in need of a quality hard drive enclosure. Able to use hard drives up to one terabyte in size, it matches up well with some of the actual external hard drives in storage capacity.

The IGP performance, overclockability and Hybrid CrossFireX pleasantly surprised me - a lot of the older games would run fine on the board at stock, better with the on-board GPU overclocked, and quite well with a $50 HD 3450 added for Hybrid CrossFire at 1024x768, and even at 1280x1024. That is not bad at all.

Overall, the BFG LS-680 offers great performance at a reasonable price. This power supply would be perfect for anyone looking to build a quad core system with multiple video cards, especially because it offers SLi certification for up to two NVIDIA 8800 GTS'. At around $120, this power supply offers a great value. I feel that the price is about right and is competitive with other companies offering comparable wattage power supplies. The five year warranty is also good.

Now that we have gotten to the source and started working with the masterminds behind Heat-Pipe Direct Touch coolers, it is time to get serious. Our first review from Xigmatek was a low cost 92mm cooler that performed better than all of our low to mid-cost coolers, but left us a little underwhelmed when compared to 120mm coolers.

As you can imagine, we have been looking forward to taking a crack at Xigmatek’s 120mm coolers to see how they compare against 120mm offerings from Noctua, Thermalright and the other CPU coolers tested this past year. Today is the day and I have a pair of coolers from Xigmatek that feature a 120mm fan.

The wattage rating label for the PSU, as you can see on the specifications page, up to 1000W of the 1100W that this PSU can supply can be drawn from the 12v rails. That is a seriously beefy amount of 12v power. The UL number indicates that this PSU has been made by Cooler Master, which means it hasn’t been outsourced to another company and just had Cooler Master stickers thrown on it.