Daily Reviews Summary 10/22/11

The Fujifilm FinePix XP30 is an easy-to-use digital camera that works really well as a point-and-shoot for times when you're on-the-go. It's also rugged to stand life's bumps and bruises, but if you're in the market for a camera to use as your primary device for taking pictures, this probably isn't the one for you.

As we draw closer to the November launch of the Sandy Bridge-E platform, we get the chance to check out some of the new motherboards that are due to coincide with the launch. Due to NDA, we can't get too specific on CPUs, nor can we talk about anything performance related. We seem to have the ability to tell you a fair bit about the board, though.

So, in following our normal preview style, we'll check out the MSI X79A-GD65 today and see what we've got to look forward to come November. Apparently I can't be specific about a launch date, but let's be honest, we all have a fairly good idea of when it's due. So what's our normal preview style? - Well, we'll check out the box and the package of the board. Once that's done we'll take a closer look at the board itself and go through some of the main features that are on offer. There are some things we can't cover, but there's a lot we can.

The SSD Review has put together a 6Gbps ShowDown that we don't ever think can be matched. Total value of testing equipment exceeds $45,000 US. Top speeds come in at 2.7GB/s performance performance and over 461000 IOPS and we have absolutely pushed two RAID cards and 13 SSDs as far as we think they can be pushed. Grab a seat and buckle up because this is going to be our best ride yet, one you definitely won't be seeing attempted elsewhere anytime soon!

On the heatsink test bench today is Xigmatek's Prime SD1484 heatsink which features a few notable changes to the standard, stock tower heatsink Xigmatek offers. For starters, the edges of the aluminum fins are squished slightly to form a blunt knife edge to reduce air flow resistance - Gigabyte tried this in 2006 with good results - Xigmatek have applied a 4mm chamfer to both edges of the fins.

The latest DiskStation DS411 4bay NAS Server by Synology is not only a very high quality unit with plenty of storage room and powerful hardware but it also comes bundled with the latest DiskStation Manager 3.2 software which offers a wealth of applications and features capable of covering even the most demanding of users.

The Asus Zenbook UX21E is a new ultra-slim notebook by Asus, that is representative of the new "Ultrabook" class of machines, to use a term coined by Intel. The Zenbook UX21E is an incredible 3mm thick at the front and 9mm at the rear and has spun metal and hairline aluminum for a strikingly sleek appearance. It's also built with Intel's new low-power Sandy Bridge Core i7 2677M mobile dual-core processor, 4GB of DDR3-1333 memory, a 128GB SATA 3 SSD and an 11.6-inch LCD with a native resolution of 1366X768.

We go hands-on in this video review but stay tuned in the days ahead for the full review.

This time we tested the Xigmatek Gaia CPU cooler. It has a tower heatsink, three 8 mm direct-touch heatpipes, and a 120 mm fan.

Video cards are a bit few and far between these days and I'm not 100% sure it's going to pick up anytime soon. I suppose it's going to come down to AMD. If they release part of the HD 7000 series before XMAS, no doubt December will be busy, but if they don't, it's going to be a busy 2012 as we should see new cards from both NVIDIA and AMD.

Today, though, it's all about the GTX 560 Ti from Palit. We saw the other day a press release from the company show up telling us about the new GTX 560 Ti Twin Light Turbo Limited Edition and straight away our attention was grabbed. The GTX 560 Ti has been a great model for NVIDIA offering some excellent mid-range performance at a fantastic price point. We've seen many renditions of the model and today Palit are showing us a new one. The question we wonder is, what's the hook? What's going to grab us and convince us that we want this card?