Daily Reviews Summary 11/28/09

Last week, Google surprised many by unveiling its Chrome OS, giving a glimpse of how it would look and more details about how it will work.

However, it revealed that Chrome OS would only be made available on specially designed hardware, and these wouldn't be available to buy until Christmas - in 2010. However, Chrome OS is an open source project and in line with that Google did release the source code. Enterprising individuals then went ahead and created a compiled version of the OS - enabling users to download and run a working OS on their machines in a virtual machine.

The NZXT Beta EVO is a mid tower black steel chassis that comes at a budget price of $29.99. Beta EVO features advanced cooling performance with support for up to 6 120mm fans with an option of a 140mm fan at the top. Beta EVO also provides external dual radiator support along with a meshed front panel allowing for enhanced cooling potential.

Today we are going to look at the ROCCAT Kave gaming headset which features real surround sound with three speakers in each earpiece. It also has an inline control which allows you to adjust volume settings for each channel in-game.

Energy Sistem^(TM) isn't exactly a common typo on the tip of the tongue, but - much like the problem of mysteriously vanishing remote controls - they've been around for a while. Barring the kleptomaniac hoardings of some thieving soon-to-be-ex friend, or a lonely and capacious housewife, the blame must lay squarely on our quest for progressively miniaturised technology. A quest manufacturers seem determined to embark upon regardless of consequence - and to which they subsequently offer their own solutions; for a modest price, of course. So in search of a stop-gap between sanity and industrial genocide, we stumble most readily across the likes of this Universal 3100 Remote Control. Whereupon the wrath of our idle thumb-poking is more than satisfied. At least until someone miniaturises the sofas behind which it's sure to disappear.

When it comes to housing your PC, there are many paths you can take. The computer case market is full of choices, from the flashy and bright to the low-key and elegant to the utilitarian. Sometimes it is hard to pinpoint a quality case for under $100, and almost impossible to find quality at a $50 price point. Today I examine a diamond in the rough: the NZXT Gamma.

Today we are testing another cooler from Zalman, CNPS9900 NT. Its design is curious, with two circular heatsinks with heatpipes shaped like the Greek letter Omega with a 120 mm fan between them. But what about performance? Let's check it out in this review.

The ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO motherboard is an AMD 785G platform built with Home Theatre PC and High Definition media applications in mind. Key to its allure are a trifecta of video outputs - HDMI, VGA and DVI - powered by the integrated graphics AMD Radeon HD 4200 graphics card and 128MB of onboard SidePort memory.

To say we were happy with the HD 5870 Vapor-X model from Sapphire would be a bit of an understatement, its fancy new cooling and small bumps in core and memory clocks made it a great card.

At the same time the HD 5870 Vapor-X was launched, the new mid range HD 5750 was released into the same series. While we're not expecting the same "WOW" factor from the HD 5750, we expect this model to carry with it better cooling numbers compared to the standard HD 5750. This shouldn't be too hard, though, since the main emphasis on the Vapor-X series is the cooling.

HIS designed a Radeon HD 5750 that uses a nearly silent cooler by Arctic Cooling which makes this card a premium choice for HTPC or quiet gaming PC. Even though the cooler is quiet, the temperatures are low, which means you can get some nice overclocking out of your card. In our case around 20% free extra performance.