Daily Reviews Summary 09/24/07

I've always been a fan of Antec products and I probably always will be, their design is very elegant and stylish, but yet under that style and class is something that is made to last for a lifetime, true quality engineering and manufacture. Today for review I've got another entry into the large wattage power supply arena, and this one is from Antec as you may have guessed, it not only looks cool with its' yellow racing stripe, but offers up 850Watts of power while being stable, efficient and quiet.

This cooler is made for silent systems. The fan has an Automatic speed control by temp. sensor. The testing cpu was an E6600.

Most gamers will agree that the mouse is one the most important pieces of input hardware one can have when gaming. Mouse is also the main input device in most game genres so it is easy to see why manufacturers would like to find the Holy Grail of gaming mouse design. Today that company is Logitech and their G9 Laser Mouse. Does it have The Right Stuff?

The Intel X38 chipset has arrived featuring full speed PCIe x16 CrossFire support and introducing PCI Express 2.0. The Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6 is the first retail-ready enthusiast class motherboard based on this new chipset to reach our labs and we've got the full scoop right here. Read on.

What can I say? Everyone knows I'm a Japanese monster movie buff, but many do not know that the last Godzilla Movie was made in 2005 and since the 1960's, the sound and action effects have come from cheesy to almost outrageous. I thought Godzilla was in the room with me - his footsteps made the room shake and his breath whistled the hair on the back of my neck. The action of the movie was brought to me and again, the sound carried throughout the house, as when I was playing music. When my HTPC is finally completed, I just might have to use these speakers.

Back in June we took a look at the GuardianX Silver Power 1000W power supply from Tagan and it received good scores. Now Tagan has a new 1300W power supply from the ITZ series. It has an 80% efficiency, is quad CPU and video card ready, and has an auto turbo mode to combine all six +12V rails into one. Also the ITZ is covered in a titanium blue mirror-finish casing. Let's see how it stacks up to the other 1000W plus power supplies we have tested.

Well, the numbers don't lie: the mystery gray goop in the syringe works rather well compared to the stock white stuff. Even if the numbers are slightly lower, that is good, as compared to being slightly higher or even the same. The ZT-100 thermal grease is easy to spread, and the 3.5 grams should last for about 4 applications.

PC enthusiasts are famous for poaching enterprise-class hardware for their personal systems. New technologies tend to debut for server and workstation markets first—just look at the latest processor launches from AMD and Intel—and we don't like having to wait for those developments to trickle down to desktop parts. Even after the latest new hotness has a change to percolate through desktop lineups, enterprise-class hardware can still hold the promise of faster performance, better reliability, and longer warranty coverage: a trifecta of goodness that's hard for any enthusiast to ignore.

Of course there's another element to our penchant for enterprise-class hardware: the sense of almost smug satisfaction we get from deploying otherwise button-down business hardware in systems that are tweaked and overclocked to within inches of their lives, most of which are spent playing games. It's much easier to justify spending money on a system you can legitimately call a workstation, too.

Lately, enterprise-class hard drives have become increasingly popular in enthusiast systems. The 10K-RPM Raptor is perhaps the best example of this trend, but not the only one. Western Digital's RE2 line of 7,200-RPM drives has also become favored among enthusiasts for its delicate balance of performance, capacity, and a five-year warranty. And now there's a new one.

Based on a Caviar SE16 750GB foundation that we already know delivers phenomenal performance with low noise levels, the latest RE2 benefits from tweaked firmware, RAID optimizations, more extensive reliability testing, and extended warranty coverage. Read on to see if those extras are enough to elevate this enterprise drive above not only its desktop counterpart, but also the fastest drives on the market.

Earlier today, we reviewed Microsoft's Notebook Mouse 5000 on CoolTechZone.com, and recommended it with reservations. Simply put, there wasn't anything particularly special about it. The 7000 is a step above the 5000, and thankfully, it does offer an interesting mix between a mobile and a desktop mouse. It continues to be wireless, albeit this time, it's with 2.4GHz wireless USB standard, instead of Bluetooth with 5000. The transceiver inserts underside the mouse for easy storage, but unfortunately, during our tests, it didn't fit in snuggly. Which was odd. We would like to believe that we are exclusive to the problem, so if any of you readers have this mouse, we would like to hear your thoughts on it.