Daily Reviews Summary 11/26/07

Gigabyte recently announced its new G-Power 2 Pro CPU heatsink which adds additional airflow to the CPU Mosfets. This airflow helps to provide additional cooling for those Mosfets, making it easier for the motherboard to provide stable power for hungry CPUs. The G-Power 2 Pro has some nice features, including a very quiet 120mm fan.

We have taken a look at a few Lowepro bags in the past. They have been combination bags being able to carry a D-SLR camera and a laptop. We all know Lowepro makes some of the best bags for cameras, but what about for laptops. The combination bags we checked out really worked well, but can Lowepro make a standout laptop bag? The Slim Factor is one of Lowepro's newest laptop bags, let's see if it can set itself apart from other laptop bags.

The NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT is the lite version of the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS. Designed to succeed the GeForce 7600 GT, it not only offers better performance but also support for DirectX 10.

For many gamers on a budget, the DirectX 10 support was the biggest reason to upgrade to the GeForce 8600 GT. Unfortunately, this graphics card falls short of expectations.

After posting the original review, we decided to take another look at it. This time, we focused on the lower resolutions as these are really the best resolutions to run the NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT and its ilks. Will the card finally live up to expectations? Read on and find out.

Both these products have a primary goal and secondary goal. The main target is to protect the users lap from the heat build up of newer and hotter laptops and both these products perform that job admirably.

After the initial OMG that's so cool! reaction, the novelty wears off pretty quickly after we had used it for a while it looks fantastic but any long term usability is destroyed by the fact *we simply couldnt read it!* It got extremely frustrating to continually have to contort myself every time I wanted to read it, as I had to have my eyes directly in front of it to make any sense of what was on screen.

For 35 I was all set to recommend it to everyone after seeing it at i31, but this fundamental problem makes it almost useless I ended up resenting to have to lean over and stretch my neck out / /yet again just to read it. So does not wanting to actually use it make money well spent? It can just sit there looking cool, which is fine if all you do is show off your PC to others, but not if you want to use it yourself.

It really, really kills me that Zalman just needs to sort this one major issue to make it a product absolutely worth purchasing, but until then its not worth the cardboard it comes in.

CoolerMaster has come up with some very unique and target-based products through the years. Some of those unique items include enclosures and extremely large, over-the-top type enclosures. The CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 is one of those enclosures. The Cosmos 1000 is large enough to house the family pet or that pesky mother-in-law of yours. Constructed from aluminum and steel, this unit is stronger and lighter than an all-steel unit. Some of the unique features include sound-deadening foam on the side panels, a removable rack-style hard drive tray, a new push button tool-less clip, and a host of other stylish features.

This card is based on the same basic board design as the Radeon HD 2900 lineup for gamers, but it is tweaked on both the hardware and software level for enhanced workstation performance. The card is the least costly of ATI's FireGL lineup based on the R600 GPU, and currently retails for just south of $1,000. Head on over to the site and check it out...

After completing all the benchmarks in the suite, I can only arrive to one conclusion, the Intel Core 2 quad-core QX9650 performs. To date it has produced the highest scores out of any processor I have used or reviewed. I like the fact that even overclocked and on air cooling, my CPU temperatures did not go above 49 degrees Celsius at 100% load and that's even with ambient room temperatures of 78 to 80 Fahrenheit or 23 to 26 degrees Celsius!

Whether you're a hardcore gamer with a set SLi or CrossFire video cards or a hardware enthusiast with several hard disks and an overclocked quad-core processor, the power draw your computer created can quickly add up to an outrageous electric bill. With so many systems now consuming 600W or more of continuous power, consumers are beginning to find ways to conserve energy and save their money. CoolMax has joined the 80-PLUS revolution by offering their Green Power CUQ-1200B modular power supply unit, and Benchmark Reviews inspects their claims as we load-test this unit for AC power ripple and DC voltage regulation.

Thumb drives are a dime a dozen, so to help sell their 8GB DataTraveler II+, Kingston added a little software tool from the folks at Migo. Their software enables the user to carry their desktop to another computer and then back again. But, is this special functionality worth the premium?

All in all, despite the one DOA fan these fans performed very well. The noise levels were decent and the fan controllers provided with each unit was a nice touch. I have had four of these fans running in my main PC for almost a month now and I honestly couldn't be happier with a fan.