Daily Reviews Summary 12/08/07

XFX has done a wonderful job with their XXX Edition video card for the GeForce 8800 GT 256MB series. Their improved cooler is a nice touch that makes their GeForce 8800 GT video cards stand out from the rest. It's tough to make a video card stand our from the crowd, but XFX has been finding ways to make it happen. The bundle with the XFX GeForce 8800 GT 256MB Alpha Dog XXX Edition was solid and it was nice to see the game Lost Planet included with the bundle. The 650MHz core clock and 1.6GHz memory clocks on the XXX edition are nice as it's a card you can plug in and just run. Users don't have to download third party applications and/or flash the BIOS to overclock...

Ultra’s X3 800-watt Modular Power Supply is the upper-middle class guy in the X3 neighborhood. He hangs out in the modular part of PSU-ville and drives some serious wattage – but nothing over the top like his 1600-watt neighbor. And for the majority of systems out there running enthusiast-class, top end gear, 800-watts is generally more than enough.

If you’re in the market for a new PSU, consider giving up the excess wattage you’ll never see on that Core Duo rig, and put the difference in price towards some hardware that will really take advantage of the juice the mid-range X3’s are already cranking out.

Any hard drive enclosure will allow you to take your files with you, but what makes the Icy Dock enclosure appealing is the tool-less installation, the build quality, and above average eSATA transfer rates. The MB664US-1SB enclosure is very heavy duty, which provides a little extra peace of mind that your data is well protected while in transit.

Due to some requests from our forum members, we have updated our XFX 8800GT Alpha Dog review with Crysis benchmarks and comparison results with an 8800GTS 320mb.

The Falcon is a fantastic game controller, although I still think a few kinks need to be ironed out. With the circular grip we used the Falcon quickly became painful to use unless you had a lot of desk space to spread out on, for example. Several of us ended up almost up-ending the Falcon completely with some over-enthusiastic swings, for example.

However, just because it is good, it doesn't mean that it'll sell or that it's good for the market. I've been round the block enough to know that selling something like the Falcon, even to seasoned gamers, will be an uphill struggle.

Sapphire's new HD 3870 card is based on AMD's RV670 GPU which is made in a 55 nm process with 666 million transitors and support for DirectX 10.1 and PCI-Express 2.0. This card that is sold for around $249 is intended to be AMD's new offering for an upper midrange card - but can it beat the GeForce 8800 GT?

Coolermaster position the Hyper TX2 heatsink as a "total cooling solution," which is a fancy way to say exhaust airflow is put to use. Behind the Hyper TX2 is a rather large air scoop. It's job is to direct airflow exiting the aluminum fins of the heatsink down towards the MOSFETs, chipsets and other circuitry positioned around the CPU socket on many Intel and AMD motherboards.

The WD Scorpio 320GB 2.5" HDD drive's interface is SATA 3 Gb/s (Gigabits per second), has a capacity of 320GBs, a rotation speed of 5,400 RPMs, a 8MB buffer size, the Read Seek Time is 12ms, power consumption is 2.5W while being accessed and only 2W when idle, the noise level is 24dBA to 26dBA, and is certified for Windows Vista. The RE2-GP 1TB 3.5" HDD drive's interface is SATA 3 Gb/s (Gigabits per second), has a capacity of 1000GBs or 1TB, a rotation speed of 7,200 RPMs, a 16MB buffer size, the Read Seek Time of 8.9ms, power consumption is 7.4W while being accessed and only 4W when idle, the noise level is 24dBA to 29dBA and is certified for Windows Vista. Watch the video to find out more and check out the bloopers at the end.

Wow, just wow! With the upcoming holiday season, the EVGA GeForce 8800 GT KO should be on the wish list of any gamer looking for an upgrade. It performed better than expected with all the titles in this review.

The new Zerotherm BTF92 "Overclockers Edition" heatsink is a mirror image of the BTF90 that came before it, save for a different fan and the inclusion of a new fan speed controller gadget the company are bundling in now. The Zerotherm BTF92 OC ed. heatsink is compatible with socket 775 Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad/Extreme and socket 754/939/940/AM2/AM2+ AMD Athlon64 processors.

Seems like there's always something new coming from the folks over at Thermaltake. It's no wonder, with an ever-expanding product line that now includes air and liquid cooling, computer cases, power supplies, external storage enclosures and fans and other case accessories. Today I'll be taking a look at the LANbox, a small form factor, portable "cube" case from their desktop series.