Here a roundup of today's reviews and articles, including MSI GTX 560 Ti-448 1280MB Twin Frozr III Power Edition Overclocked, ASUS U36SD-XA1 Notebook Review: The Battery That Never Dies, and ASRock 970 Extreme4 AMD Socket AM3+ Motherboard Review



MSI GTX 560 Ti-448 1280MB Twin Frozr III Power Edition Overclocked
TweakTown posted a review on the MSI GTX 560 Ti-448 1280MB Twin Frozr III Power Edition Overclocked video card

The other day we checked out the brand new MSI GTX 560 Ti-448 1280MB Twin Frozr III Power Edition and found ourselves extremely impressed what the limited edition model from NVIDIA was offering us for the holiday season. Being part of the Power Edition series from MSI, though, means that it stands out more so than a lot of other companies, and via the help of MSI Afterburner we're able to overclock the card.

Today we'll be firing up MSI Afterburner and seeing just what we can do on the overclocking side. Knowing MSI, the Power Edition should give us a decent overclock and we should hopefully see a nice boost in performance. Before we get into the performance side of things, though, the first thing we need to do is check out our test system setup. Once we've done that we'll quickly cover how we went with the overclocking side of things before we of course run the card through our gauntlet.

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ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe Motherboard Review
OCIA.net has posted their review of the ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe Motherboard

After my recent review of the impressive ASUS Sabertooth P67 board, I was wondering what ASUS could have in store for us next. Intel released their Z68 chipset not too long ago and ASUS is certainly on schedule with their Z68 lineup. There is a lot to choose from with 10 different Z68 offerings from the company. Today we are going to take a look at the ASUS P8Z68 Deluxe, second in line only to the Maximus IV Extreme-Z as ASUS' top Z68 motherboard.

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bequiet! Straight Power E9 CM 680 W Power Supply Review
Hardware Secrets posted a review on the bequiet! Straight Power E9 CM 680 W Power Supply

The brand bequiet! belongs to the German distributor Listan. This company has released several power supplies with the 80 Plus Gold certification, under the Straight Power E9 series. Five of them (400 W, 450 W, 500 W, 600 W, and 700 W) don't have a modular cabling system, while three of them do (480 W, 580 W, and 680 W). These models carry the letters "CM" for "Cable Management." Let's see if the 680 W model is a good option.

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Nyko Kinect Zoom Lens Kit Review
TestFreaks takes a look at the Nyko Kinect Zoom Lens Kit

The Kinect is a great addition to the Xbox 360, it adds a more physical aspect to gaming and it’s just a lot of fun really. The one problem with the Kinect is that it needs a lot of room to work, and people with small living rooms or apartments are going to have a problem with it. Nyko has come up with a solution for that and it’s called the Zoom and it does what it sounds like, it zooms the Kinect lenses in so you can play in a smaller area. I’ve got one and I’ve used it for a while and I found that it really does work as advertised. I’ve got a large living room, but it still felt a bit cramped with the couch in the way, with the Nyko Zoom I don’t have to worry about the couch anymore really.

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ASUS U36SD-XA1 Notebook Review: The Battery That Never Dies
PC Perspective posted a review on the ASUS U36SD-XA1 Notebook

One of the most accomplished manufacturers of this type of laptop is ASUS, which has been building U-Series ultraportables for several years now. We’ve generally given them high marks here, but now there is a new model to check out, the updated U36. Unlike the stylish U33 Bamboo, this model is a tough, simple laptop that seems to take ques from Lenovo’s ThinkPads. Has this compromised the series? Let’s find out.

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ROCCAT ALUMIC Gaming Mousepad Review
TechwareLabs posted a review on the ROCCAT ALUMIC Gaming Mousepad

Is this the item to complete you gaming arsenal? Come read to find out if the ALUMIC mouse pad by ROCCAT is the lynchpin to your road game.

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ASRock 970 Extreme4 AMD Socket AM3+ Motherboard Review
OcInside posted a review on the ASRock 970 Extreme4 motherboard.

The AM3+ board is based on the AMD 970 chipset with SB950 southbridge and offers five PCI Express slots, up to four USB3.0 ports, five SATA3 ports, one eSATA3 port, one Gigabit LAN port and 7.1 sound over six analog sound connectors or digital sound over optical SPDIF and coaxial SPDIF output connectors.
The current AMD 970 motherboard supports the new AMD FX 4-, 6-, or 8-Core Bulldozer processors as well as the AMD Athlon II or AMD Phenom II CPU.
Let us take a look at the ASRock 970 Extreme4 motherboard.

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eVGA Is The GPU King?
eTeknix.com posted a new article: eVGA Is The GPU King?

Evga were originally founded in 1999 and are focussed towards lots of different markets, including the system builder, distribution and of course, the retail sector. Whilst they have a lot of product ranges which including graphics, motherboards, displays, peripherals and much more, we want to focus more on the VGA side of their business today.

The graphics card market is taken up by two major brands, as we know. AMD and Nvidia are both rival competitors and both have their merits as well as their not so great points, but that's for another article. AMD and Nvidia both produce the GPU core, whilst their partners produce the coolers and the rest of the technology based around it.

The cooler generally consists of various components that are built from the ground up to offer a silent and efficient solution to keeping the graphics card cool. We find a lot of manufacturers utilising a copper heat-pipe design with a large fan to exhaust the hot air out towards the rear of the card, whilst others are manufacturing cards with water cooling type designs. We've even see types of cards with both style coolers, which looks like some kind of science experiment gone wrong.

How the design of the card looks is entirely up to the partner, and we've seen some seriously hideous designs in the past, whilst others are simply beautiful. The only cards that look the same are the reference cards from AMD and Nvidia which simply have a branded sticker on them, but that's all down to the GPU manufacturer's and the way that they wanted things launched.

Now we're not going to mention about the war between AMD and Nvidia, as we said, they both have their good and bad points, and that's all down to personal opinion at the end of the day, and whilst some vendors such as Asus and Club3D cater for both AMD and Nvidia, others such as Evga focus on just one brand; Nvidia in this instance.

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