Daily Reviews Summary 12/02/09

If you're looking for a brand new, high performance PC for Christmas, but don't fancy building a system from scratch and overclocking it yourself, then chances are you'll want to go to a respected system builder to do the job at the right price for you. This is where Cryo PC comes into the equation, offering up a range of heavily overclocked, performance-oriented systems to suit a wide range of budgets. Today, we take a look at one of their Cryo Quad parts to see how both this system and Cryo's system building philosophy stack up in the market for factory overclocked PCs.

Recently I looked at my first dual channel kit for the P55 platform. Today we're going to get stuck into the second one. The first thing that I have to mention about this kit from G.Skill is the name. I'm not sure what it is, but the name Ripjaws just sounds so cool. I've got my fingers crossed that it doesn't just stop there and hopefully we can slot the kit into our P55 test system and find ourselves getting excited about what the new series is able to offer us.

The kit we're looking at today from G.Skill is a little faster than the PC3-15000 kit we looked at from OCZ recently. Instead we're moving to that PC3-16000 number which has become the main number for overclockers wanting a kit that's going to offer a bit more power.

TechwareLabs reviews the X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Pro, a sound card aimed at the hardcore gamer. Take a look with us as we see if this card can bring the thunder.

With music becoming increasingly centred around the home computer, a decent set of PC-compatible speakers has become almost a necessity. Even leaving aside the tendency towards downloading - legal or otherwise - keeping your CD collection on a hard-drive is now common-place and provides many benefits. It's easier to organise, retrieve and backup media stored to disk than hundreds (or even thousands) of CDs, tapes, LPs, mini-dics, and such.

Even when recorded in one of the many loss less audio formats - FLAC, True Audio (TTA), Apple Loss less, MPEG-4 ALS, etc - a hard-drive the size of a paperback could store many hundreds of CDs, thus making it an extremely efficient use of space. Since we'll all be living in Tokyo-style pods soon anyway, larger media will probably become obsolete eventually, if not merely at an excessive premium. The thirst for a clear and precise rendering of all that binary finery is quite palpable, but perhaps Speedlink can satisfy it?

Thecus brings a lot to the table with the N0503 Combo NAS. You have the choice of using up to five 2.5” drives or up to three 3.5” drives for storage, and the new, more polished AJAX-based web interface is a step in the right direction. All the familiar features are here too including the media server, print server, web server, and a myriad of other functions that are all customizable for your particular needs.

The ROCCAT Sota is the second product to be released under ROCCAT's notorious SDMS (Smart Desktop Management System) and combines the properties of both a hard and soft pad into an interesting new surface solution.

DiRT2 is one of the biggest games of the year for ATI with it being a major DirectX 11 launch title for the company. With the red team raving about it, we take the time to find out how the game runs. We're not just going to have a look at how the game handles the Radeon HD 5970 and HD 5870, we're going to go through the whole HD 5000 series starting at the HD 5750 to see what's going on with these new DirectX 11 video cards and DiRT2.

The next page will tell you the test system we're using and will also give you a bit more detail on the exact video cards we'll be using today. We'll then get stuck into benchmarking the game at a number of resolutions to see how each video card performs at different resolutions. So let's not delay, jump over to the next page and see what's going on with DiRT2.

Amacrox is a new player on the power supply market, with its products being manufactured by FSP. Will their Free Style 650 W (a.k.a. AX650-80EP) unit survive our tests?

In this review I will test a CPU cooler from Blacknoise, which is compatible with multiple sockets and will see how well it handles stress on both X58, P55 platforms. Its issues and interesting design will be explained later in the review.

The lack of a Northbridge means the elimination of the hottest chip on the motherboard and the need for cooling that chip, along with the associated traces, etc, which means building a P55 motherboard costs less. Apparently the motherboard manufacturers have passed those savings along to the consumer, the average price of a P55 board is about $100 less than the average price of an X58 board. The processors are less expensive too, the release price of the LGA 1156 Core i7 860 was a little less than $100 below the release price of the LGA 1366 Core i7 920. And its given that a dual channel memory kit will cost less than a triple channel kit with the same specifications, so expect to save $200-$250 when building a new LGA 1156 rig as compared with a new LGA 1366 rig in the early part of this year. Today I will be looking at one of Asus new P55 motherboards, the P7P55D EVO. It is in their EVO family of motherboards, sporting the EVO look and Asus TurboV EVO overclocking. It has tons of other features, after all, it is an Asus board. Read on to check out the Asus P7P55D EVO Motherboard!

Robust storage is starting to become a hot item. Just recently Cameron tested the A-DATA SH93, a water and shock proof external USB drive. Many years ago I was the first to test Corsair’s Flash Voyager and while testing I boiled the drive in water on my stove and then froze the USB thumb drive in the freezer. I can’t claim that I have ever ran into a situation where I found myself in below freezing temperatures for an extended period of time, or in a hot tub with my portable storage, but at least I am prepared for when the time comes.

Today we are taking a look at the SimpleTOUGH from Hitachi, an external USB drive enclosure that is made to handle the abuse power users, rock climbers and friends over to play some Modern Warfare.

The Xigmatek Balder SD1283 is an HDT tower that features stunning aesthetics with polished finishes, along with a great price. It is also Socket LGA1156-capable for your new Core i5/i7, as well as LGA1366, and AMD AM2/AM3 compatible. That is a very attractive combination for consumers, so let's take a closer look at the Xigmatek Balder and see how well it performs during testing.

It may seem like a given that personal data should be kept secure, and for the most part, achieving that goal on a home PC isn't too difficult. But, what about a thumb drive? Kingston's DataTraveler Locker+ is designed in such a way that if someone ever finds your thumb drive, they'll never be able to access the data. Ever.