HotHardware 2010 Back To School Shopping Guide

It's that time again. The time of year where students and parents frantically hit e-tailers with overnight shipping deals in order to get that all-important back-to-school technology into a dorm room or backpack before classes begins. It's back-to-school season, and whether you've started classes recently or are awaiting (dreading?) that first 8AM lecture, there may be a few bits of techno-shopping that need to be taken care of before you can be on you're on your way to that straight-A report card.

Whether you're about to begin the Fall semester of college or your senior year in high school (or something else entirely), you'll probably need the right hardware to get you through. In the pages to come, we're taking a look at today's latest and greatest when it comes to systems, hardware and peripherals that could prove useful for any dutiful student...

The Silent Pro Gold 800W is a model in Cooler Masters new high end PSU range and features some unique design elements and 80 Plus Gold Certification. Let's find out if Cooler Master have what it takes to compete in this area.

The GTX 460 series has been nVidia’s finest card series in the current generation and the popularity is proving to help generate a good amount of revenue for the guys in green. Compared to other Fermi cards the GTX 460 uses less power, runs cooler and overclocks extremely well, even with plain air cooling.

With such overclocking potential, the market has been saturated with overclocked editions and today we put two of these to the test in an SLI feature. eVGA have released an ‘SC’ (SuperClocked) Edition which increases the reference design speeds by 13%.

The new Silencer Mk II power supply series from PC Power & Cooling features a synchronous design with DC-DC conversion, single +12 V rail, 80 Plus Silver certification, and seven-year warranty. We've already tested the 750 W version and it proved to be an excellent product. Let's see if the 650 W model is also a good option.

Today I have Antec's newest power supply. A power supply so new.. it won't be available until October. So new.. the unit I received didn't even come in a retail box. But at least I got a PDF representation of a box! The power supply we're looking at today is the Antec High Current Pro 1200W, or HCP 1200 for short.

Home theater setups still pretty popular in some circles, especially with the availability of Blu-ray components and smaller form factor motherboards supporting full-size processors. NMediaPC has been in the HTPC game for some time now, and their new 1080P aims at giving users a micro ATX solution that won't be detectable as a PC on most entertainment centers. It's sleek, low-profile design (and $59 price tag) should draw a crowd at many online etailers.

Today we're going to review a number of GeForce GTX 460 768MB 192-bit and 1024MB 256-bit products. Note that we're specifying bus widths and memory sizes. As you will see, these two product variants are quite different in terms of performance.

NZXT has release the Sentry LXE, a fan control and monitoring system like nothing else we have seen on the market today. Check out how the LXE LCD touch screen panel works with your system in our review.

A NAS is a NAS, right? Not so with the DS210j from Synology. For the DS210j, NAS means Network Application Server, Move over devices that only give you shared folder support, the DS210j offers all the functionality of a x86 box in a small and neat package. The DiskStation Manager software brings it all together in a tight package.