Daily Reviews Summary 12/03/08

The Asus P6T Deluxe is a good value motherboard (which may be a little expensive for most) that works well and you can easily ignore the bits you don't want to use without losing out on the experience. It is an excellent backbone for some Core i7 shenanigans, despite the fact Asus could really do with a tidy up and consolidation in the future.

NZXT, a company known for it's unique lineup of gaming hardware, accessories and cases, has added a new case to it's Classic Series. This new case is the NZXT Whisper, a Silent Steel Full Tower. According to some, it is the big brother or a step from the NZXT Hush Mid Tower case.

Now that the new Intel Core i7 platform is on the market and consumers are looking into building systems for the holidays Legit Reviews takes a look at four different memory speeds to see if going with faster memory is worth the extra cost. We run the kits at 1066MHz, 1333MHz, 1600MHz and 1866MHz on five different benchmarks to see if any difference can be noticed by just changing the memory speed in the BIOS.

The Zotac Nitro OC Controller was conceived to help make overclocking your graphics cards a breeze. We take a look to see if it really works.

I've been covering in-ear monitors lately, but it's time to change pace for a set of full-fledged, open, over-the-ear cans. This time around I'll be jamming with Sennheiser's HD 595, which sits in the middle of their audiophile headphone line. Ah, the classic scene of powering on your Hi-Fi system in the living room, dimming the lights, tossing on a pair of huge headphones, and settling into your favorite easy chair with a glass of Glenlivet 25, neat. My modern equivalent involves my iMac, a desk chair, and a Lone Star tall boy. Not quite as classy, but the phones I'm sporting spruce the picture up a bit.

A+ El Diablo Advance from Tagan is a full-tower case targeted to users worried about ventilation. It has a big 330-mm side fan (with 300-mm blades), two 180-mm fans on the top (with 160-mm blades) and one 250-mm fan on the front (with 220-mm blades) – all featuring speed controller –, plus a thermometer. Let's see if this is really a good case.

Kolobags (based in LA, California) produces and sells many different styles of designer laptop bags. While many of the upper end bags they sell may be expensive, they do have bags for every price range, and all of them are very unique. The bag I got to review was the Shoreline Greensmart Laptop Jacket 15.4" in black and green. The cost of the bag is $39, which is about $10 more than a laptop sleeve, but this bag has a few pockets, and there are not many comparable products, so I this price is reasonable. I love the colors on this bag, the black and neon green scheme is my favorite, and the sleeve green accents are not overpowering as the inside (which is all green) is going to be covered by a laptop most of the time.

I am not exactly sure how I expected the Sapphire Radeon HD4830 512MB graphics card to fare during testing, but it wound up looking more like an enthusiast grade card than an entry level offering. It should be able to handle just about any game without having to sacrifice too much in terms of frame rates or settings, making it a great option for the gamer on a budget.

If you're shopping for a laser printer you can usually expect to pay more than you would for an inkjet printer, but it will pay itself back over time with much lower printing costs. Start shopping around for a colour laser printer and you will suddenly see a huge price hike compared to their monochrome counterparts. Since a single toner cartridge itself can run between $30 and $100+, you can imagine the extra costs in making a printer that uses four of them. With colour laser printers having been in the market for long enough now, we're starting to see manufacturers take a step towards playing with their design a bit more. Trying to entice people to spend a little extra and go for a colour laser instead of that old monochrome laser which doesn't print nice pictures. I happen to have the Samsung CLP-315W sitting here today, a colour laser printer promising a smaller size than most and a lower price than most while still managing to integrate wired and wireless networking capabilities.

It was not that long ago that we all got excited about 2GB and 4GB pen drives, but as flash memory continued to develop and become cheaper, we continually saw improvements in the amount of storage space we see in portable devices.

Only a short while ago the usual suspects started releasing 32GB pen drives, but that portable storage milestone was short-lived – and has since been smashed. Patriot Memory continues to push the boundaries by releasing one of the first high-performance 64GB pen drives to the market, just in time to be a stocking filler or ideal geeky gift for Christmas this year.

The PC gaming industry has seen many graphics chips come and go. Companies like 3dfx, S3, Trident, Intel, nVidia, ATI and others have tapped into the gaming industry and have produced 3d accellerators for the PC, and most of them have gone. There are only two major players in the PC graphics industry: nVidia and ATI.

These two graphics juggernauts unveil new products every year, which effectively doubles the effective processing power over the previous generation. This ruthless competition is both good and bad news for consumers: Good in that faster technology becomes cheaper, and we have many options. Bad in that the expensive video card you just purchased will remain bleeding edge for only a few months.

The latest battle comes just in time for the 2008 holiday season. ATI's 4800 series goes up against nVidia's GTX line of cards. Sapphire is one of the more well-known manufacturers of ATI-based video cards, and they have a secret weapon in the world of single-GPU video cards. Their 4870 Toxic video card not only comes pre-overclocked, but is stacked with 512MB of the fastest GDDR5 memory, which is certainly enough for today's gamer.

The PC-60FW turns out to be another winner from Lian-Li. The level of quality, professionalism and attention-to-detail has been properly carried over from previous models to this one, and it shows in many places, from the nicely-installed window to the improved HDD cage. Additionally, the relocation of the PSU to the bottom of the case helps improve the layout by making it cleaner and less prone to airflow blockage from messy cables.

I very much like the dual slot cooler because I personally had issues with early HD 4850 card overheating and this card stayed cool and quiet even when overclocked to speeds higher than the stock HD 4850 cards. Sapphire was smart about the heating issues on the HD 4850 with their dual slot cooling solution and I am very pleased to see they brought it to their HD 4830 line as well to aid in cooling. Out of the HD 4830 cards I tested this one stayed the coolest even to the touch. My HD 4850 has to sit in my case for a few minutes before I even dare to remove it because I have burned my fingers on it before. Sapphire did a great job in designing and building the HD 4830 for us.