t was a busy end of the year with all the new product releases and announcements. We saw the release of the new AMD FX processor lineup which did not fair well overall, but still serves me well in my personal rig. However, a CPU is only as great as the motherboard to which you pair it. While many sites used the AMD issued ASUS Crossfire V 990FX boards for their initial reviews (a great board I might add) we were able to use something different for our tests. The GIGABYTE 990FXA-UD5 we found to be a very competent board, but let’s take a closer look to find out what else this motherboard brings to the table.
http://www.futurelooks.com/gigabyte-990fxa-ud5-am3-atx-motherboard-review/
Not everyone wants a giant tower CPU cooler. Some people want dual fans and monstrous fin real estate, but some prefer something a bit squatter
http://xsreviews.co.uk/reviews/coolers/cooler-master-geminii-m4/
Offering very good data transfer speeds, one of the most complete bundles I’ve ever seen and an exceptional price/capacity ratio the brand new V+200 120GB is a worthy addition to the SSDNow business line of solid state drives by Kingston.
When we were at CES, CyberLink was showing a beta version of PowerDVD 12. There were some advancements in the product versus its predecessor, PowerDVD 11 - most notably automatic refresh rate switching, but the best part was that they gave me a copy to bring back and test on a variety of systems to provide a preview of what PowerDVD 12 has to offer. As much as I would have liked to publish this earlier, they asked that we not until today. This turned out to be a good thing though, because there was time to create a few videos and take a much more thorough look at the product than would have been possible otherwise; just keep in mind that the copy that was tested was not the final revision so some of the issues may not be present in the real release and I was not able to get the APK for their DLNA application for my Kindle Fire so that aspect will only be covered briefly.
With AMD launching the 7950 today, XFX have released their Overclocked Black Edition card and we take a first glance at what it has to offer.
Thermaltake's Dr. Power II works as advertised, is relatively accurate and has an easily used and intuitive interface. Two testing modes allow the user to make a quick pass or zero in on a suspect connector or rail. It's compact, lightweight and the large LCD screen is easy to read.
http://www.tweaknews.net/reviews/thermaltake_dr_power_II_review/
With the release of the new Radeon 79xx series cards we may have witnessed a change in graphics King. The 7970 is without a doubt currently the performance king. The problem is priced anywhere from $579 for the standard edition 7970 to over $800 for anoverclocked version you have a card that few but the affluent can afford. Into the Sapphire 7950 Overclock Edition an enthusiast level graphics card more than capable of rendering any game you want to play even in Eyefinity (as we will demonstrate) for a mere $480 or lower. This puts it in a much more affordable and thus more appealing category.
http://www.techwarelabs.com/sapphire-7950-overclocked-edition-video-card-review/
"The Solo sits in the same Sonata-series of cases as the Sonata III and Sonata Elite we've reviewed before, and
the whole range is designed to be as quiet as possible. Let us see what the new Solo II brings to the table. "
http://metku.net/index.html?path=reviews/antec-solo-ii/index_eng