Reviews 51911 Published by

Here an overview of the latest reviews and articles:

- Antec TruePower New 650W Power Supply Review
- AMD Phenom II X6 1075T & X4 970BE review
- Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB Flash Drive Review
- Aerocool E80-600 Power Supply Review
- Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H Motherboard Review
- WD TV Live Hub Media Player w/ 1TB of Internal Storage Review
- Notebook Round-up: Room Gaming vs Portable Gaming
- PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+ 1 GB Review
- Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SOC review
- Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU Cooler Review
- MSI R6870 Video Card Review
- Zotac Zbox HD-ID34BR-U nettop Review
- Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 Review
- PowerColor HD5770 Crossfire Review
- Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strikeforce Notebook Cooler Review
- Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 vs PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 Review
- Gigabyte Aivia K8100 Review
- VisionTek Radeon HD 6870 Review
- Understanding the 80 Plus Certification



Antec TruePower New 650W Power Supply Review
Kitguru posted a review on the Antec TruePower New 650W Power Supply

When building a new PC, it is important not to overlook the importance of a power supply. Without solid, stable power delivery a system can experience hard locks and in worst case scenarios, even component failure. Thankfully the market has no shortage of high quality, cost effective solutions available and today we will be looking at a product from Antec which retails for a modest £85 inc vat.
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AMD Phenom II X6 1075T & X4 970BE review
t-break posted AMD Phenom II X6 1075T & X4 970BE review

AMD's new mainstream offerings got Intel beat. [/quote6
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Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB Flash Drive Review
ThinkComputers.org posted a review on the Patriot Xporter XT Rage 32GB Flash Drive

The USB flash drive has not really changed much. We have seen all types of flash drives over the past few year, ones that are practically indestructible and other that are waterproof, but the technology in the drive itself really has not changed. Patriot has decided to change this with the Xporter XT Rage line of USB flash drives. These drives feature a Quad Channel configuration, data is intelligently managed and transferred simultaneously to 4 NAND chips resulting in vastly enhanced performance, particularly write speeds: Rage improves on traditional USB 2.0 Flash Drives to offer up to 27MB/s read and 25MB/s write transfer speeds. Let’s take a look…
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Aerocool E80-600 Power Supply Review
Hardware Secrets posted Aerocool E80-600 Power Supply Review

Let's see if this 600 W entry-level power supply from Aerocool is a good buy.
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Gigabyte GA-880GMA-UD2H Motherboard Review
Ninjalane has posted their review of the MicroATX board from Gigabyte the GA-880GMA-UD2H

It is very difficult to classify a MicroATX motherboard; do you consider it a mainstream component for business or multimedia systems or say something like "it's perfect for HTPC"? In the case of the GA-880GMA-UD2H we might contend it is both.
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WD TV Live Hub Media Player w/ 1TB of Internal Storage Review
Legit Reviews posted a review on the WD TV Live Hub Media Player w/ 1TB of Internal Storage

Western Digitial released the WD TV Live Hub media center last week and we have spent some time using this Full-HD 1080p media player that has a 1TB built-in network hard drive. This media player lets you stream HD video, music and photos from the on-board drive to any DLNA/UPnP-compatible TV or multimedia device in your home or office. This media player might just be the most robust on the market today! Read on to see what we think!

We really had no limitations to the types of files we tested with the WD TV Live Hub. We loaded a USB hard drive with all sorts of media files (AVI, ISO, M2TS, MKV, MOV, MP4, MPG, TS, VOB, WMV, MP3, FLAC, OGG) and the Live Hub was able to play each one quickly with no problems whatsoever. Many people are not only concerned with how HD MKVs and WMVs play, but if Blu-ray ISOs work. I'm happy to report that the Live Hub's functionality is consistent with the WD TV Live Plus playing the BD ISO files with no problem, but unfortunately, we still don't get BD ISO Menu support. The Western Digital WD TV Live Hub plays almost every kind of multimedia file available and acts as a network attached storage device as well as media server to anyone on your local network. This media player is by far the best Western Digital has produced and we consider this the best player on the market today...
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Notebook Round-up: Room Gaming vs Portable Gaming
InsideHW.com has compared 10 Notebooks: Room Gaming vs Portable Gaming

The popularity of portable PCs is on the increase each month. The number of notebooks sold in comparison with ordinary PCs speaks clearly about this. Yet “home” configurations still have the upper hand in one very strong and profitable segment – gaming. Gaming notebooks are more and more numerous, but their prices go from 1000€ upwards, while a really wicked machine requires nearly 2000€. Desktop variants offer much better performance for way less money. Of course, you won’t be carrying them around and playing games in a park, but gaming is simply much cheaper this way. What we wanted to do this time around is prepare a very ambitious test, i.e. confront desktop PCs and notebooks. As 800€ seems to be the go-to price range for a good gaming PC nowadays, the display and peripherals included, we wanted to check out which portable PCs can be bought for that kind of money, with features and performance being worthy of the attribute “gaming”…
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PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+ 1 GB Review
techPowerUp posted a review on the PowerColor HD 6850 PCS+ 1 GB graphics card

PowerColor's HD 6850 PCS+ is an overclocked variant of the HD 6850. But the changes do not stop here. PowerColor also includes their own cooling solution and has done extensive changes to the voltage regulation circuitry on the card. But is this enough to compete with the excellent AMD reference design?
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Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SOC review
The Guru of 3D posted a review on the Gigabyte GeForce GTX 460 SOC

Gigabyte has released a handful of GeForce GTX 460 cards, based on the reference design with a slight overclock, yet also an SOC series graphics card which is a factory overclocked model with the new WindForce 2X based cooler sitting on top of that GPU.

Now we've already seen a couple of models based on this cooling solution, but the Gigabyte card really is something special as it is the fastest factory clocked 1024MB SKU out on the market.
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Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU Cooler Review
ThinkComputers.org posted a review on the Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU Cooler

Arctic Cooling is known for their CPU coolers and today we get to take a look at the Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2’s predecessor the Freezer 13. It features a small and compact design with a 92mm PWM fan pre-installed. The pre-applied MX-4 along with the included installation hardware makes installation quick and easy. Read on further to see how well it performs.
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MSI R6870 Video Card Review
Benchmark Reviews posted a review on the MSI R6870 Video Card

AMD's first video card in the new HD 6xxx series occupies a brand new position in their video card product hierarchy. The Cypress chip, as used on the Radeon HD 5830 with 334 square millimeters of silicon, was way too big for just 1120 shaders and 16 ROPS. The new Barts GPU uses just 255 mm2 to do the same job only better, with twice the number of ROPs. Although AMD was denied the opportunity to roll out 32nm-based chips for this product cycle, they went back to the drawing board and optimized this new generation of GPUs for the current 40nm manufacturing process at TSMC. AMD did a better job of interpreting the rule book last time out, and their full line of 40nm GPUs stayed out in front for a full 6 months. AMD has successfully introduced an addition class of GPU (as defined by die size), to fill the performance gap that existed within the 5xxx series. You may have seen some benchmarks already, but please follow along with Benchmark Reviews as we take a complete look, inside and out, at the MSI R6870-2PM2D1GD5 graphics card.
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Zotac Zbox HD-ID34BR-U nettop Review
The Tech Report posted a review on the Zotac Zbox HD-ID34BR-U nettop

This sleek, small-form-factor machine serves up Blu-ray playback, USB 3.0, Nvidia discrete graphics, and a dual-core Atom. Is it the ultimate home-theater nettop?
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Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 Review
PureOverclock has published a review of the Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 CPU Cooler

The Xigmatek Aegir SD128264 is a double heatpipe HDT tower that features great aesthetics with polished finishes, along with a great price. But how does the Double Heatpipe technology perform? Let's find out.[/quote6
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PowerColor HD5770 Crossfire Review
OCC has published a review on the PowerColor HD5770 Crossfire

What is there to say about the PowerColor HD5770 in a CrossFireX setup other than "Wow!"? The performance of the PowerColor HD5770 in a single card setup was about mid-range when it came down to the benchmarking scores, synthetic and real-world gaming performance. However, once you threw a second card into the setup, you were able to see some great numbers beginning to pop out.
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Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strikeforce Notebook Cooler Review
Hi Tech Legion posted a review on the Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strikeforce Notebook Cooler

The Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strikeforce Notebook Cooler is designed specifically for these higher powered notebooks. The Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strikeforce is large enough to fit even a 19" laptop, and has two variable speed 1200~2600RPM 140mm fans to provide a lot of cooling muscle. If the included fans are not to your liking, they are easily removable and changeable. The Storm SF-19 Strikeforce has an all black color scheme with a mesh top and black inlaid rubber accents to keep your laptop from any unwanted movement. To bring some color to the party, the Cooler Master Storm SF-19 Strikeforce has ambient LED lighting, selectable to seven different colors, as well as a setting to continuously cycle through the colors. The Storm SF-19 Strikeforce also has a convenient powered USB 3.0 hub with four ports.
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Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 vs PowerColor Radeon HD 6850 Review
HardwareHeaven.com posted a comparison review between Inno3D GeForce GTX 460 vs PowerColor Radeon HD 6850

On our test bench today we have two cards from the £150-165 price range which sit on either side of the NVIDIA and AMD divide. Those products are the Inno3D GTX‚ 460 OC and PowerColor's Radeon HD 6850 and we will be putting each through a selection of real world tests to find out what their strengths and weaknesses are.
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Gigabyte Aivia K8100 Review
PureOverclock has published a review of the Gigabyte Aivia K8100 keyboard

The latest market that Gigabyte is tackling is peripherals, and specifically keyboards. Gigabyte's first gaming keyboard is the Aivia K8100. This keyboard comes comes in three different colours: black, red, and yellow. The Aivia also comes with a few nifty key features that we'll examine in greater detail.
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VisionTek Radeon HD 6870 Review
Neoseeker posted a review on the VisionTek Radeon HD 6870

We hope you haven't gotten enough of these new ATI mid-range graphics cards, because we got a new Radeon HD 6870 review. This time its got the Visiontek branding, and is essentially a no-frills reference card release. Find out if the Visiontek touch helps the Radeon HD 6870 stand out against competing mid-range offerings in our latest article

With reference specifications, the stock performance should be on par with other HD 6870s we have looked at in previous reviews, but we will also be overclocking the card to see how well it performs with increased frequencies. The average HD 6870 has limited overclcoking head room and most have capped out around the 970MHz mark, with a few limited exceptions being able to reach 1000MHz. It will be interesting to see how the VisionTek model overclocks and if it can reach that often elusive 1000MHz achievement.
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Understanding the 80 Plus Certification
Hardware Secrets takes a look at the 80 Plus Certification

Efficiency is traditionally an overlooked power supply specification. It says how much power is being wasted while you are using your PC. Problem is that you are paying for this wasted power. The 80 Plus certification was created to allow consumers to know which power supplies are the most efficient ones and, as the name implies, guarantees that the power supply is able to present efficiency of 80%. With more and more manufacturers trying to design power supplies with efficiency well above 80%, they decided to create three new certification categories: Gold, Silver and Bronze. Learn what they really mean.
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