Daily Reviews Summary 12/02/11

The SilverStone RAVEN RVS02 is an external 2.5-inch hard drive housing that is designed to be portable and fast thanks to the Super Speed USB 3.0 connectivity. The enclosure is also screwless, so you can quickly and easily swap out hard drives. Read on to see how this affordable portable drive enclosure performs when we put it to the test!

Overall, I found the SST-RVS02 to be a good 2.5" external enclosure. The fact that it incorporates innovative features such as tool-less hard drive installation and carbon fiber decorative molding, one can quickly see the SST-RVS02 becoming a favorite among enthusiasts...

A somewhat less techie article today .. well. ADATA recently released a USB stick, all 3.0 compatible and it's called the N005 Pro from their Nobility series of products.

We test the 64GB version of this model, and their N005 Pro is fast for USB flash storage alright, the little fracker can get you read performance of 180MB/sec peaks while writing just under 90 MB/sec.

So, what I've determined here is that I have a high-end cooler with a mounting design that needs some work. I have found similar quality mounting systems on $20 or $30 coolers, but not one that costs $70. With a mounting system designed the way this one and others like it are, it's almost impossible to achieve even pressure over the surface of the CPU die! Instead of having a full-faced, even contact patch between the cooler and the CPU, you end up with at BEST a line contact or even worse, point contact - both of which will completely destroy the performance of the cooler.

Our test bench has seen a flood of Z68-based enthusiast motherboards this fall and ASRock added their flagship Z68 Extreme 7 Gen 3 board to the top of the pile for testing. The Extreme 7 Gen 3 pulls out all the stops for extreme enthusiasts and ultra overclockers by arming this board with next-gen PCI-E 3.0 support and an NVIDIA NF200 chip to allow users to run dual graphics cards at PCI-E x16/x16 mode and three graphics cards at x16/x8/x8 respectively.

The NZXT Phantom has been a huge success, spawning various color options including pink and black/orange. The Phantom 410 continues with the same design elements, but at a much smaller overall size - lovingly called "Phantom Mini".

Today we are looking at another Battlefield 3 related product from Razer, we earlier took a look at the Scarab mousepad that we thought was awesome. Today we take a look at the Onza Xbox 360 and PC gaming controller. Hopefully this can keep up with the good trend of great products from Razer as we are going to test it on a PC and also a Xbox 360 in various gaming environments.

Aimed towards home and small workgroup users the latest entry-level DiskStation DS212j NAS Server by Synology really has what it takes to become the bestselling unit in its class and price range in 2012.

The Alpenföhn K2 is the company’s own attempt at a dual tower cooler. Before they start being accused of trying to copy Thermalright or Noctua, we have to remember that the K2 has been in development for a very long time and the first prototype was first seen back at Cebit earlier this year. So what exactly is the K2? Following their theme of naming coolers after famous mountains around the world, their dual tower cooler very appropriately takes its name after the world’s second highest mountain, Mount K2.

Once again the dragons are upon us, and once again a challenger emerges to defend humanity from their wrath. ECS's A990FXM-A socket AM3+ has landed on our testbench, ready for battle, sword and shield in hand. Will the ECS A990FXM-A save us from the black hole that is slow computing? We find out.

I’ll be frank: I don’t like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. We’re all going to spend way more money than we probably should during the holiday season, and I don’t like to support the crowds and general craziness any more than I have to. So, now that the two biggest shopping days are behind us, we can settle in for more reasonable prices and recommendations. There will definitely be more sales, but what we’re going to look at are the products that we’d recommend even at the regular prices; if you can find these on sale, than by all means consider the recommendations even stronger.

Today’s buyer’s guide will focus on the mobile sector, but let’s not get carried away. Specifically, I’m going to be looking at netbooks, laptops, notebooks, ultrabooks, Chromebooks, etc. What I won’t be covering are other mobile devices like tablets, smartphones, and eReaders; I’ll save those for another guide by someone that knows those markets better than I do. So with that out of the way, let’s talk categories and specific recommendations.

Over the past year Legit Reviews has had the opportunity to play with a few system boards from BIOSTAR. Each time they have left us impressed with a great cost/performance ratio. The BIOSTAR TA990FXE AMD 990FX AM3+ motherboard retails for $129.99 which is the lowest cost AMD 990FX motherboard we have looked at to date. How will it stack up to a pair of AMD 990FX motherboards that are nearly double the price? Join us as we find out!

When deciding on a new motherboard there are always a couple of areas to look at. First is the features that you need in a motherboard; the BIOSTAR TA990FXE has a rather solid feature set. Compared to some though, it's not as packed with features. BIOSTAR kept the features down, which in turn kept the price down. The BIOSTAR TA990FXE retails for only $129.99 which is one of the lowest priced AMD 990FX AM3+ motherboards on the market today.

Roccat have firmly entrenched themselves as a big player in the peripheral line. Does the Isku keyboard maintain this momentum?