Daily Reviews Summary 12/05/09

While commonly overlooked, regular backups is one of the most sensible tasks one should perform when it comes to personal computing. Without the help of a secondary storage device or some sort of remote backup strategy, chances of recovering data should your computer's hard drive completely die
overnight would be bleak at best.

Reliability and durability should also be taken into account. Portable hard drives are just an accidental drop away from irrecoverable loss, so spending a bit more to ensure data safety is a no-brainer for someone as ham-fisted as myself.

A-DATA has taken it upon themselves to deliver such a product with their new SH93 line, bringing the industry's first waterproof and shock resistant portable hard drive. The SH93 was designed for road warriors who need to take their storage with them on the harshest of environments.

Surely, Xeon X3450 and especially X3440 are more interesting for overclockers than Core i7 860 (cheaper, easier to overclock, demonstrate similar results at the same frequencies) or i5 750 (faster at the same frequencies). This is a curious phenomenon, considering that Xeons are designed for servers and workstations.

Noctua, who is already well known for having great performance in their coolers, and at almost silent operation, had recently released a new 140mm fan, the NF-P14. This fan boasts more CFM and lower noise than the already good NF-P12 that Noctua users are accustomed to seeing and using. From previous testing, I can see a bit of room for improvement on CFM, but to do that and actually lessen the noise levels, now this I got to see!

Aside from the noise levels, Noctua “super sized” the cooling capabilities of this version, not unlike the V10 concept, but Noctua saw no need for the third radiator, or a TEC for that matter. The new release utilizes two large fin assemblies and two fans to get the job handled. Knowing what I have seen from Noctua, I am excited to say the least.

Current power supplies are all about efficiency and power and for good reason, you want enough power for power hungry system while being efficient enough not to destroy your power bill. Thermaltake has updated their famous Toughpower line with the newer Toughpower XT 750w which we will be looking at today.

At 12.1-megapixels, the Canon PowerShot SD940 IS is a powerful digital camera with plenty of features and it comes in a small sized device. The shooting speed is also very quick and the price is not much either, so it will go easy on your budget as well. Other features include HD video capture and a HDMI port for content playback on an HDTV.

Their second method to increase their market presence is the release of their first affordable stand alone music system the Sonos ZonePlayer S5. Priced at $399 it is still somewhat expensive but with the S5 the user gets a single portable receiver and speaker solution. The S5 can be easily integrated into a Sonos enabled home or work as a solo device for the Sonos newbie.

We have reviewed many high end gaming systems in the past from both Alienware and parent company Dell, but today we take a look at something slightly different - the new Inspiron 13z. The Inspiron 13z has been designed by Dell to enter into the market just above the 'netbook' sector - for those wanting more versatility, higher quality screens and faster processing speed.

These days portable equipment is as ubiquitous as vomit in pub toilets, which in turn has meant a general move towards devices that allow you to recharge in-situ. Presumably so as to avoid the need to wipe said vomit from a nearby mains socket, and saving you the trouble of constantly needing to replace removable batteries. It's also standard practice to make just enough of your product proprietary - or dependent on something that is - in order to maximise profit without pushing the consumer too far. This means you can end up carrying around a separate charger for every portable item you own along with the bushel of interfacing cables. Adaptors are of course abound, but it would be nice if more devices came with a selection of common fittings the way the Turbocharger 3400 does. This portable charger gives you the ability to juice up anything from mobile phones to hand-held consoles, and all on the move.

USB (Universal Serial Bus) is just now beginning to transition from Hi-Speed USB 2.0 to SuperSpeed USB 3.0, which has been a long time coming. SuperSpeed USB 3.0, as it is officially called, is touted as being the next generation in bus interfaces and full backwards compatibility with USB 2.0 and 1.1. Read on to see how it performs!

It was nearly five years ago that we tested the first Corsair Flash Voyager that offered just 512MB of memory, but at the time it was quite a modest amount of storage for a USB 2.0 flash drive. The Flash Voyager was unique though from the other flash drives on the market in the respect that it was waterproof and far more durable than any other flash drive. As time has passed, more manufacturers have adopted designs similar to that of the Flash Voyager. The capacity of flash drives has also increased and we have tested out the 4GB, 8GB, and 16GB versions of the Flash Voyager and their newer and faster Flash Voyager GT series too. We have also reviewed other innovative Corsair flash memory products like their Flash PadLock and we happened to be the first publication to deliver a review of the Corsair Flash Survivor GT. Now though we are back with the Corsair Flash Survivor GT as we test out one of their newer versions with a 32GB capacity.

Vi-On from Thermaltake is a hard disk drive enclosure with a suspension mechanism for the hard drive, a sheet of rubber foam to reduce the noise produced by the drive and a temperature-controlled fan. It is available in two versions, with eSATA port and without this port, and two choices of color, black or white. Let's take a look on the black eSATA model.

Today we are taking a look at a motherboard from MSI, they sent us a sample of their socket 1366 board which they've named the X58M. It has some cool features such as; Live update, APS power saving function, etc. We decided to run the board vs a high end Asus board in our tests so lets take a look at how it can perform in both normal benchmarking and overclocking.

Seventeam is slowly entering the US market and ST-650P-AF is one of the power supplies from this brand that can be found here in the USA. Is it a good product? Can it deliver its labeled power? Check it out.