Daily Reviews Summary 12/21/11

If you've followed what goes on with the ASRock model numbers, you would know that the -M refers to the board using the mATX Format. The mATX boards from ASRock, though, don't only bring with it a smaller board, they also bring with it a cheaper price and at the time of writing the ASRock Extreme4-M is the cheapest X79 motherboard available at Newegg, coming in at $218.99 US.

It will be interesting to see how the cheapest X79 board performs today. Before we see how the X79 Extreme4-M performs, though, we need to check out the package and bundle to see what ASRock are offering us in that department; once we've done that we'll take a closer look at the board before we move into the BIOS.

Fancy a Volvo T5R? Then maybe the Enermax MAXREVO 1350w PSU could be perfect for you! Alcohol fueled analogies this is not, more a lack of sleep!

We finally test the Crucial M4 128GB SSD and will check out the performance of this very popular SSD. Obviously the M4 series is nothing other then a success story, and with a lot of people not trusting SandForce anymore we'll have a peek, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.

The Desk Pro is a stackable external desk drive that uses USB 3.0 technology to connect to your PC or MAC. Three capacity sizes are available; 1TB, 2TB and the drive we are looking at today, 3TB. The Touro Desk Pro ships with two distinct backup platforms. The first is a seemless backup to the external drive and the second is a free cloud service with 3GB of space. The cloud service can be upgraded to 250GB with a paid subscription.

We see our fair share of external drives throughout the year, but the Hitachi Touro Desk Pro stands out from the crowd with its cloud backup service. Hitachi calls this two levels of data protection. You get 3GB out of the box for free, but this account can be upgraded to 250GB for a yearly fee. The cloud portion of the backup can be accessed through any IP device like your PC, tablet or smart phone.

The Fractal Design Arc Midi Tower is the upper end mid-tower in the company's second generation of cases to hit the US market. While the Arc Midi Tower has a distinctly different aim than its predecessors, it retains all of Fractal Design's signature high points.
The Arc Midi is Fractal's signature black powder finish, with faux black brushed steel on the nose and white internal component hardware and fan blades. Styling is understated with no flashing lights, and makes for a very elegant presentation. As the name suggests, the Arc Midi is a mid-tower, comfortably fitting a full sized ATX, micro-ATX of mini-ITX motherboard.

Up for review today I have the Pantech Link II which is what you would call a feature phone, it’s not an amazingly high-tech assistant like other phones out there, but it gets the job done and sometimes that’s all you really need. The Link II is more of a social centric phone and it does feature a full qwerty keyboard and the capabilities we’ve come to expect from our phones like Bluetooth. The phone is very user friendly along with being thin and lightweight and best of all it’s very inexpensive.

Christmas is just around the corner and for those who still have their Christmas shopping to do we have lots of helpful advice for you before you decide to start buying. We know value is at the heart of most buying decisions so we have structured our buying guide into helpful price points between £50 and £150 for each of the component areas we have taken a look at which are processors, graphics cards, motherboards and storage drives.

The £50 price point is the entry level, for those looking for value for money and functionality without spending too much. The step up to the £100 marks a transition from entry to mid range and enthusiast giving significant performance increases particular in graphics. While the £150 price point is the point we consider the 'maximum' of what a money conscious buyer would go to when it comes to buying components.

With regards to building a completed system we advise that you take components from similar price points when you pair things together in order to avoid getting performance bottlenecks. We hope our processor, graphics card, motherboard and storage drive recommendations come in useful and give you some helpful food for thought this Christmas shopping period.

Finally amidst a hard drive crisis we also take a look through the best hard drives to buy as well as the best solid state drives: can you still pick up a decent amount of storage for a good price?

Thermaltake recently added three new models to the Toughpower XT series. Today we are testing the 1275W model, which is the first Platinum unit that Thermaltake releases. With more and more Platinum certified models on the market, it will be interesting to see how Thermaltake's latest power supply manages.

Today we've got a full tower chassis from Enermax called the Spinerex. They're a fairly well respected company, so I expect great things from this case. As a full tower, I'll be looking to ensure that it can contain a hearty helping of computing goodness, as well as the normal things like build quality, materials used and cleverness of design.

Vengeance is the name they have struck upon to wreak havoc among the gaming fraternity and while a full line up of gaming peripherals is about to be unleashed under the vengeance umbrella, Corsair have not forgotten their roots and have blessed a range of memory modules with the same title.

The thin-and-light market is seriously heating up, and with CES 2012 just around the corner, Lenovo's hoping to sneak some sales in during the last few weeks of the 2011 holiday season. The IdeaPad U400 is a sleek, sexy machine, understated from top to bottom and aimed at mid-range buyers who have never had so many options. You can't really call this an Ultrabook (you'll need to ogle at Lenovo's IdeaPad U300s for that honor), but it's still super slick. And in its roomier 14-inch weight class, you actually have fewer options to pick from.

Of course, looks are only half of the story; is the entire package worthy of consideration this holiday season? Let's dig in and find out.

Let's take a look at the latest mid-tower case from the South Korean 3R System, the T100 Valkyrie, which comes with eight expansion slots and several other features.

You may remember that back in October, we took a look at the OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD, which simply blew us away in terms of the performance that was on offer with lightning fast speeds and a decent set of internals featuring a SandForce controller.

Working on the success of that drive, OCZ have developed the Max IOPS version with a few minor touches from themselves. The development on the Max IOPS has had a bit of a revamp in terms of the PCB, the NAND used with Toshiba Toggle Flash being used opposed to IMFT flash as seen on the original Vertex 3. These little touches allow the Vertex 3 Max IOPS to deliver more when it comes to the overall I/O operations per second, which is the whole purpose of this drive.

Small form factor systems are nothing new, but with the Mini-ITX form factor they keep on getting smaller. Today we are going to take a look at a motherboard that is perfect for a small form factor or media center application. The board is the Zotac Z68-ITX WiFi Supreme and it features support for second generation Intel Core processors, discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 430 graphics processor, support for DDR3 memory, USB 3.0, SATA 6GB/s support and of course built-in WiFi. Read on as we check out this tiny motherboard!