iStarUSA T5F-SS Internal SATA Hot Swap Bay Review
APH Networks has published a new review on the iStarUSA T5F-SS Internal SATA Hot Swap Bay

It's quite popular nowadays for consumers and enthusiasts alike to own at least one or two external hard drives and hot swap them for data logistic purposes. Unfortunately, most of these devices are limited to either eSATA, USB or Firewire on the external interface. These products certainly make mass data storage dvices more portable and accessible, but its nature makes it only a temporary means of physical storage (Placing it on your desk and using it in a permanent fashion doesn't really cut it). For those users that want the convenience of an external drive and performance of an internal drive, but without the fixed format of an internal drive, an internal hot swapping bay may be a viable solution -- making it extremely convenient to swap hard drives, yet taken into a semi-permanent space. Let's say you have five people who wants to use a single computer, but does not want to mess around with the data on one hard drive, and penta-booting is not an appropriate way of solving this problem. Solution: Have five hard drive, one for each user, and let each user plug in their own hard drive for their own usage session. That may not be everyone's case, but hey -- we're just giving a possible scenario. Today, we will be taking a look at the iStarUSA T5F-SS, an internal SATA hard drive hot swap bay. I have to admit I never heard of iStarUSA before writing this review, but they do seem to be a long standing maker of OEM and ODM products.

iStarUSA T5F-SS Internal SATA Hot Swap Bay Review

Norton Internet Security 2009 Review
TechReviewSource.com posted a review on Norton Internet Security 2009

The all new version of Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2009 has been released and it has a lot of improvements and new features that really make it a security suite to have. Users will notice improved performance and a new interface and much more. Read TechReviewSource.com's full review to find out all the details.

Norton Internet Security 2009 Review



Gelaskins for iPhone 3G and 15" MacBook Pro Review
DragonSteelMods posted a review on the Gelaskins for iPhone 3G and 15" MacBook Pro

Modding is one way to make your technological device different. However, physical modification of an electronic device can be precarious and time consuming. Fortunately, GelaSkins has the solution to protect ones device from scratches and make it stylish at the same time.

Gelaskins for iPhone 3G and 15" MacBook Pro Review

Asus M3N78 Pro Review
InsideHW.com has posted review for Asus M3N78 Pro motherboard

It's been a while since nVIDIA introduced nForce 780a i.e. 750a chipset. These chipsets have GeForce 8200 IGP that offers good IGP performances but still a little bit below those that offer AMD 780G and 790GX chipsets. Also introduced is nForce 730a chipset, as derivative of those and with the same graphics core. nF750a and nF730a are single chip solutions with the difference of nonexistence support for SLi for nF730a, therefore it's attended for cheaper solutions but with possibility of Hybrid SLi support.

Asus M3N78 Pro Review

Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition Video Card Review
Benchmark Reviews posted a review on the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition Video Card

When everyone thought AMD was sinking into a dark abyss, ATI unvieled their Radeon HD 4000 series and proved the critics all wrong. The Radeon HD 4870 is their current single-GPU flagship, and it's earned a high level of well-deserved distinction. Palit has followed-up this pattern by adding some stand-out features of their own. Benchmark Reviews tests the Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic edition video card from Palit. This RV770 graphics solution offers factory overclocked perfomance and a new cooling solution.

Palit Radeon HD 4870 Sonic Dual Edition Video Card Review

Silverstone RVM01B RAVEN Gaming Mouse Review
Hardware Canucks posted a review on the Silverstone Raven Gaming Mouse

First appearing at CES 2008, the RAVEN looks like it should be on many gamers' shortlists. Having the ability to fine tune and customize every mouse movement is a start, add a lightning fast mouse sensor capable of 3200dpi and we may have the complete package we have been waiting for. The RAVEN can handle up to 50G of acceleration, and allows for independent X and Y axis dpi adjustments, perfect for fine tuning to match users' preference.

Silverstone RVM01B RAVEN Gaming Mouse Review

ASUS P5Q Premium Review
OCC has published a new review on the ASUS P5Q Premium

Overclocking the ASUS P5 Premium was a breeze. For starters, all I did was adjust the CPU VCore and the memory voltage and lower the memory strap to keep under the 1000MHz memory speed and started to up the Front Side Bus little by little until the system would become unstable or not boot. With each 5Mhz raise of the FSB I would run MEMTEST 2.0 until errors started to appear. Then I backed it down to where there were no errors and booted into Windows. I then ran benchmarks to test stability and again would drop the FSB by 5MHz increments until I could boot, run and pass all of the benchmarks with no errors. With a 1.45v VCore I was able to push the Q9450 CPU to 460MHz from the stock 2.66GHz to obtain 3.680GHz stable. That is a 1000MHz increase over stock just by raising only the VCore and tweaking the minor voltages. While everyone will never get the same results on various systems, I am very please with this boost in "free" performance.

ASUS P5Q Premium Review

ASUS Rampage Extreme Review
Techgage.com posted a review of ASUS' current highest-end enthusiast motherboard, the Rampage Extreme

When the time came to design the Rampage Extreme, ASUS' R&D went right to town. The X48-based board proves to be the most feature-packed one we've ever come across, and also one of the most overclockable. Aside from the robust design, water-cooled Northbridge and LCD Poster, the board even includes overclocking controls right on the PCB.

ASUS Rampage Extreme Review

DFIs Auto Boost System (ABS) Investigated
TweakTown takes a look at DFIs Auto Boost System (ABS)

If anyone has ever made overclocking a hard task, it’s been DFI. Mostly designed for the advanced users, we tend to find ourselves looking at a BIOS with not only more options than you can poke a stick at, but more options than you can poke two sticks at!

Well, it seems like DFI have finally decided to look into this and offer a solution that’s going to cater to a wider audience. The thing about ABS, though, is there’s more than what meets the eye. DFI haven’t just created a process to make overclocking easier, but also a community to bring overclockers together and try and increase the awareness. Today what we’ll do is have a look at how you go about setting up the whole ABS thing and see what kind of performance difference the stock and overclocked results give us.

DFIs Auto Boost System (ABS) Investigated

Danger Den Tower 26 Review
Bjorn3D takes a look at the Danger Den Tower 26

Today we take a look at another vital part of every computer, the case. It's what holds it all together. In days gone by, a case has been a matter of function over form. As time goes by however, more and more people get involved in modifying or 'modding' their computer cases; some for looks, some for performance gains. Manufacturers have certainly taken notice and it seems that every day we see another new case enter the market. LED's, side windows, and front panel cutouts have all seen increases in popularity. One of the primary concerns of modern computer enthusiasts is, and will likely remain, heat and the ways to deal with it efficiently.

One of Danger Den's latest entries into the market is their new Tower 26. This is not your average case. It is completely acrylic, HUGE, and will accomodate the largest liquid-cooling radiator on the market, the Black Ice GTX480, without any modification. That's a radiator just over 120mm x 480mm. For those involved in water-cooling their systems, that is a very large radiator capable of removing a lot of heat. For those that don't want liquid anywhere near their system, that still allows for 4 fans mounted on the front of the case.

Danger Den Tower 26 Review

iStarUSA HDD Docking Station + HDD Reader Review
Virtual-Hideout posted a review on the iStarUSA HDD Docking Station + HDD Reader

In today's market, the "big idea" behind having multiple hard drive comes with a certain niche attached - convenience, security, or cost. Naturally, the convenience of being able to quickly replace a dead drive and return the array to working order, the security of being able to take the data with you, or the cost of effectively having multiple computer systems, with only the hard drive being changed. Call this last notion bygone if you will, but some of the people I spent my past college days with followed these ideas to a T. Take for example, one of my classmates - outside of the classroom, he designed and maintained databases. In that respect, having two hard drives, with the interest of always having a working machine, and avoiding the inevitable debacle, when a classroom coding experiment goes horribly wrong. In that spirit, these two products received today - the T5-SS Hard Drive Reader and xAGE-N99-SAU/US HDD Docking Station will be viewed as a complete solution - or what you can utilize to have the freedom of two systems, but maintain the data portability of having a partitioned drive. Let's start simple, with the T5-SS.

iStarUSA HDD Docking Station + HDD Reader Review

QNAP's TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS Review
Bit-Tech published a review of QNAP's TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS

Compared to the likes of Netgear's ReadyNAS NV+ the QNAP TS-409 Pro Turbo is significantly cheaper - over £150 - but the Netgear has upgradable DDR2 memory, bigger flash memory, a bigger (and potentially quieter) fan, a small LCD screen and basically looks better. The Netgear X-RAID similarly corresponds to the RAID migration and expansion on the TS-409 and if you don't care about upgrading it or how it looks - grab the TS-409 Pro and save yourself a ton of cash.

What about doing it yourself though? We've already showed you how to Build your own server and then improve on it - and you can have whatever hardware combination you like as long as it's got drivers for Linux. Old CPUs, motherboards and small amounts of memory are dirt cheap now and modding is our thing, yet while it's incredibly fun to do this kind of project a lot of us just want a complete solution and you're unlikely to make anything this compact and easy to use without either a significant time and skill investment.

It's certainly seems expensive on the surface but in actual fact it's quite a bargain compared to other 4-disk NAS drives worth owning. There are many external drive solutions ranging from local USB and eSATA, but if you've ever felt the need for a completely independent and self sufficient NAS, the TS-409 has become one of those things that once we've used it, we'll find it hard to go back. Having owned a two disk NAS myself and now using this, my Thecus N2100 now feels woefully insufficient and while £420+ is a lot of money, if you're serious about managing your data properly, it's certainly a case of getting what you pay for.

QNAP's TS-409 Pro Turbo NAS Review

XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition Review
bit-tech published a review of XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition

When we first had a look at XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO XXX Edition during our initial look at AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 4670, we said that the card was too expensive to really be a competitor with the AMD's new card. However, since then the pricing has dropped by around £10, which makes it only £5 dearer than most Radeon HD 4670 cards on the market today.

With just £5 between the two cards, the purchasing choice is almost a no brainer, unless you are strictly limited to spending £60 and no more. XFX's card offers quite a bit more performance in the games tested here and seems fairly well-suited to current games on the market at 1,280 x 1,024 in particular. At a stretch, playing games at 1,680 x 1,050 is possible, but you'll need to make some sacrifices in games like Crysis especially.

Unfortunately though, we were able to find one (yes, one) Radeon HD 4670 for just under £55 -- Force3D's Radeon HD 4670 is available on Ebuyer for £54.99 (inc. VAT). This makes things difficult for us because £10 is quite a large difference in price in the mainstream market -- XFX's 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition costs 18 percent more.

Of course, we could talk about how great the Radeon HD 4850 is here, and why you should look to stretch to one of those if at all possible, but you're going to have to spend twice as much as these cards to get one. That takes it out of the equation completely, as far as we're concerned -- they're gunning for completely different markets.

If Force3D's Radeon HD 4670 stock dries up and no other AMD partner offers the 4670 at under £55, then the decision is a no brainer -- spend the extra £5 or so and get the XFX card because it's well worth it in that situation. However, if more AMD partners drop their 4670 pricing to under £55, both cards look like decent choices -- it'll depend on how much you've got to spend at the end of the day. We'd recommend stretching your budget as far as possible if you can, because the additional performance delivered by XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition is arguably worth an extra tenner.

XFX's GeForce 9600 GSO 680M XXX Edition Review

Gigabyte GC230D Atom Mini-ITX motherboard Review
TechSpot posted Gigabyte GC230D Atom Mini-ITX motherboard review

Out of curiosity, I recently ran some power consumption tests on my own PC, which admittedly uses the latest hardware available in the market. The results were somewhat disturbing, sucking down about 300 watts at idle, and nearly 500 watts when under load. Combined with a 30" LCD and a number of additional devices attached to it, things start to add up, particularly the power bill.

But what is the best way of going about building a low-powered desktop computer that still has enough guts to get the job done? Enter the Gigabyte GC230D Atom motherboard, measuring just 17 x 17cm (6.7 inches), this tiny board incorporates an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor and all other basics for less than $100.

You may have heard of the Atom 230 CPU already, built using a 45nm design process, boasting a core area of just 25mm2 and a thermal design process of a mere 4 watts!

Gigabyte GC230D Atom Mini-ITX motherboard Review