Daily Reviews Summary 11/17/09

The PC users out there today who are looking to put together their own little studio without much coin, read on as by the end of this review, you will probably be ordering one for yourself.

Antec's new form factor, CPX, is a few months old now. Though it has yet to catch on with other manufacturers, this hasn't stopped Antec from introducing new products that use it. Ladies and gentlemen, today's review will be of the brand new CP-1000.

Don't let its small size fool you - the Thecus N0204 miniNAS comes with RAID 0, 1, and JBOD support, which means that you can optimize your storage for speed or security. Never before has there been a NAS storage device this small that can be purchased for under $150. Read on to see how it does with a pair of Kingston SSDNow 40GB V Series 2.5" drives in RAID 0!

There is not a whole lot to say wrong about HIS's final HD4850 release for this chipset. The product does exactly what it was intended to do and that is to be a solid gamer with a quieter and more efficient cooler at a good price. HIS was smart to keep on supporting this product for the next while seeing it will sell very well even today.

Our friends at Sapphire, the worlds largest builder of AMD/ATI Radeon video cards, sent me a nice box the other day. Today I will be looking at the Sapphire Radeon HD 5850, the latest successor to two great video cards, the HD 3850 and HD 4850. When I first received an HD 3850, I was pleasantly surprised by its performance. I called the HD 4850 the most significant product to enter the market in 2008, and I still stand by that comment. Will the Radeon HD 5850 do its predecessors proud? Read on to see!

Its large size and hefty amount of airflow right out of the box from the factory proved that fans do make a difference, though they may remain slightly audible. The case is very solid and sturdy, has a conveniently placed I/O and button panel, and is one of my favorite cases out of the ones that I've tested. I am disappointed with IN WIN with the major mishap on the placement of the motherboard access hole, as it is useless for the motherboard I used, and probably for most other x58 boards!

AMD's release of the 5800 series graphics cards has fueled enthusiasts pursuits with jaw-dropping performance, but for those select people who are looking for something even more elite, today we'll be looking at the ASUS Radeon EAH5870 Voltage Tweak Edition. It is a card that brings some unique features to the table, enabling enthusiasts that dream of speed to push the bar even higher than ever.

Now we move on to a far more important topic - Real-world game testing. Here, we put both our AMD Radeon HD 5870 CrossFire configuration through its paces under Windows 7 Home Premium x64 in no less than eight current game titles. For the duration, of this article, we'll be catering towards standard sized LCD owners by starting out with a target resolution of 1920x1200, albeit with AMD's own 12x edge detect anti-aliasing mode and 16x anisotropy enabled to make the most of the additional image quality capabilities on show here, before following this up with some far more GPU intensive rendering at 2560x1600 for you 30" LCD owners out there to stress the boards more fully - first without any anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering, followed by testing with 8x AA and 16x AF enabled.