Daily Reviews Summary 09/23/08

Today for review I've got the Verbatim 160GB FireWire/USB portable Hard Drive, it allows you to take large amounts of data with you and remain portable at the same time. The enclosure itself is plastic so it's lightweight, and as the name suggests, it can be used with either USB or FireWire connections. The drive come pre-formatted for the Apple file system, but it can be easily formatted to be used with a PC as well.

A few short years ago a 500 watt power supply was considered more than you will ever need. However as technology advances so does the power requirements. With today's Quad core processors, dual and quad graphics cards and of course the array of water pumps, fans and drives, 500 watts just won't do.

Today we will be throwing a few of the latest and greatest gaming titles at the 9500 GT XXX as well as some PhysX processing and media playback to ascertain whether this product really is the card of dreams for a budget minded consumer.

The Olympus SP-570UZ (Ultra Zoom) is an unusual breed in the camera lineup. Because it doesn't have interchangeability of lenses like a SLR (single lens reflex) camera, it is technically a point-and-shoot camera. Yet it offers many features that are commonly found in more expensive digital SLR cameras. We set out to find out whether a half-breed of this type would be valuable.

It's clear that the shortcomings are all Netflix-based, the greatest of all being selection. They don't have a lot of recent content, and they have a lot of content rated three stars and worse. Often with TV shows, they will have some but not all episodes of a season. But they're adding things constantly, and generally expanding as fast as they can afford to. By the time I thought I'd watched everything I thought was worth my time, I checked again and found an equal quantity of media gems. (Like Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter. How can that possibly go wrong!) Of course, even that's not entirely up to Netflix, they have to prove to the developers and owners of the content that streaming is the way to go; there's a real "we're all pulling together" sense about this stuff. There's potential.

Tired of having to be home to watch that show you like? Now you dont have to. Its the VOX TV-R. Small, portable, and sporting a plethora of handy features, the TV-R not only lets you record shows off of your television, but playback digital movies, view pictures transferred from your computer and much, much more.

It's comes as no surprise that the latest dual GPU cards, the Palit 9800GX2, and Sapphire 4870X2 score the highest. At the same time, it's interesting to see how close the single GTX260 and GTX280 cards compare in terms of performance, despite them being priced lower than the performance leader, the Sapphire 4870X2. The most surprising result of this comparison, to me, is how the 9800GX2 is neck-and-neck with the 4870X2, especially when overclocked, even though it costs considerably less. There is a loose rule-of-thumb that the higher priced cards are the best performers. Remember that the cards are ordered in the graphs by ascending price. As the prices increase, the performance doesn't necessarily increase proportionately as sometimes you get less performance! So let's take a look now at the performance when taking the cost of the card into consideration.

The V14 Pro is a redesign of the Thermaltake V1 we reviewed back in December 2007. At the time the V1 proved to dominate the retail coolers from both AMD and Intel and even outperformed the Thermaltake MAX by a small margin in load testing. Since then, Heatpipe Direct Touch (HDT) coolers have emerged as the next great cooling technology and Thermaltake needed to increase performance to stay competitive in the highly contested CPU cooler market.

The Thermaltake V14 Pro was born out of this need and on paper looks to be a contender for dominance in CPU cooler performance. With a massive 140mm fan that is capable of running up to 1600 RPMs, six heatpipes, up from the four used on the V1 and standing an impressive 161mm tall, Thermaltake may just have a contender for the crown of best CPU cooler tested here at TweakTown.

This time around we test and review the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked from EVGA.

The all new GTX 260 model has 24 more shader processors and was overclocked at default to squeeze more performance out of it. Overall we where very happy with the price versus performance ratio giving you a really good gaming experience. Be sure to check out this review.