Here a roundup of today's reviews, including Alpenföhn Himalaya CPU Cooler Review, G-Technology G-DRIVE slim HDD Review, and Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7.5 Review



Alpenföhn Himalaya CPU Cooler Review
Vortez posted Alpenföhn Himalaya CPU Cooler Review

Continuing on their naming traditions, the Himalaya takes its name from the famous mountain range separating the Indian Subcontinent from the rest of Asia; perhaps aptly named to reflect the height of the cooler at 164mm. This isn’t dissimilar to the Thermalright Archon’s design and purpose. Alpenföhn are confident that their cooler can match the might of its namesake so we are holding high judgement on the Himalaya.

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Case Labs MAGNUM M8 Case Review
Legit Reviews posted Case Labs MAGNUM M8 Case Review

Whenever you look for a new case to hold your new awesome build do you always say "I wish it had..." but live with it anyway? Case Labs, a new vendor, thinks they have the last case you will EVER buy! Legit Reviews checks out this claim and runs the Magnum M8 through its paces. This is one case review that you don't want to miss!

This case as been awe inspiring since it hit our dock given the number of options and the sheer size of the MAGNUM M8. Case Labs obviously put a lot of time into the design and listened to a lot of customer feedback and then combined that with the skill and tools to make this work of art. If you made us pick the thing we liked most about the MAGNUM M8 it would simply be options. We have never seen a case that gives you this level of flexibility both for your current build and most likely for many after...

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SoliCharger-SP Review
TechReviewSource.com posted a review on the SoliCharger-SP

The SoliCharger-SP is a portable, rugged speaker system for your iPhone, iPod or any most other USB devices. It also charges your devices via the included power adapters and mini-solar panel on the front of the case. It works great for hiking, fishing, camping or just around town where you want high-quality audio without the need for batteries.

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Diablotek Legend Computer Case Review
TechwareLabs posted Diablotek Legend Computer Case Review

Diablotek's new Legend offers a remarkable value in an entry-level gamers' enclosure, offering features usually found in more expensive models. Diablotek's legend offers a remarkably good deal on advanced features. However, these products often come with drawbacks and cut corners - but at $40 street, is this likely to be a showstopper? Realistically, it depends on one's needs and expectations.

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Crucial C300 vs. m4 (4 x in RAID 0) - Time for an Upgrade
TweakTown posted Crucial C300 vs. m4 (4 x in RAID 0) - Time for an Upgrade

Just over 12 months ago we checked out the Crucial C300 256GB SSDs in RAID 0 and found ourselves very impressed with the performance that Crucial was offering with the new SATA drives. The C300 drives from Crucial were one of the first SATA III drives to come out and in RAID 0 we saw some awesome performance out of the 1TB setup via the four 256GB drives.

Today we jump forward and find ourselves looking at the brand new m4 drives from Crucial to see what's going on with performance. We'll also be taking the same approach as we did last year with the four drives on hand which will again be running in RAID 0. Outside of the new m4 drives, though, we've got ourselves a brand new Areca RAID card to make sure we're able to get the most amount of performance out of our drives. We'll take a closer look at that in just a moment, along with a closer look at the drives themselves.

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ASRock A75M-ITX FM1 Mini-ITX Motherboard Review
Futurelooks takes a look at an AMD A75 board

I believe that the AMD APUs are the only choice for a single chip HTPC solution and I stand by that statement. The best possible option would be paired with an mini-ITX motherboard and a very small form factor case. Using the right cooling solution, you could build a very power HTPC that is no larger than a Nintendo Wii and just as quiet, allowing you to enjoy all your media in your living room. Today, we are going to see if the ASRock A75M-ITX motherboard at an MSRP of $89.99 is the board to fit that role. Let’s check it out!

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World of Tanks NVIDIA 3D Vision Game Review
Benchmark Reviews posted World of Tanks NVIDIA 3D Vision Game Review

World of Tanks (WoT) is a free-to-play MMO-action video game loosely based on World War II-era tanks from the Soviet Union, Germany, USA, China, Britain, France, and Japan. Players can open either a free or premium account, and earn their way up a tiered ladder by competing against other online players in random battles. World of Tanks is developed for the Microsoft Windows PC platform, and is designed to be played using a wide range of computer hardware: from portable laptops with integrated graphics to high-performance desktop computers with discrete graphics. For those simply wanting to grind their way to the top almost any graphics platform will do, but it takes a powerful video card to deliver immersive high-quality graphics and beautifully detailed scenery. For the enthusiast gamer who wants life-like realism, NVIDIA 3D Vision technology adds depth and out-of-screen effects that help take World of Tanks beyond its flat 2D battleground.

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MSI Radeon HD 6950 1GB Twin Frozr III Power Edition OC Review
Hardware Canucks posted a review of the MSI Radeon HD 6950 1GB Twin Frozr III Power Edition OC graphics card.

The most recent graphics card in MSI's quickly expanding stable doesn’t aim for the headlines but continues a longstanding tradition of offering excellent performance at a reasonable cost. Their HD 6950 Twin Frozr III 1G/OC (yes, it’s a mouthful) only goes for around $260 but should be able to play almost any game on the market at its highest detail settings and mid to high resolutions.

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Corsair Hydro H80 and H100 Review
PureOverclock has published a review of the Corsair Hydro H80 and H100 liquid cooling units.

We've seen a few self-contained water cooling packages from Corsair and CoolIT over the past few years. And interestingly, these two companies have combined forces and now work together to produce water cooling units for the masses. We're looking at their latest units, the Hydro H80 120mm and H100 240mm. Let's see how they perform.

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ASUS G53SX 15.6-inch Gaming Notebook Review
Techgage posted a look at ASUS' G53SX gaming notebook.

Enthusiast-level gaming notebooks don't need to cost a fortune; something ASUS proves with its $1,249 G53SX 15.4" offering. It features a 1080p display and an NVIDIA GTX 560M that's able to power today's games to it. This, in addition to an Intel quad-core processor and 12GB of RAM make it a very powerful and drool-worthy notebook.

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Noctua NF-F12 PWM Fan Review
Hi Tech Legion posted Noctua NF-F12 PWM Fan Review

Noctua is a very well-known company that produces some top notch fans, with some very impressive cooling capabilities at near silent decibels, compared to other fans on the market.The NF-F12 is Noctua's first venture into a PWM fan, not because they never saw a need for one, but simply because they wanted to do it right and on their own terms. Noctua's NF-F12 implements a new PWM IC with SCD (Smooth Communication Drive). The NE-FD1 PWM IC basically gives smoother torque impulses giving you a quieter fan at lower speeds. The NF-F12 also runs at a mere 0.6w @ 0.05 amps, making it a very power efficient fan for those who would like to go green.

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Enermax MaxRevo 1350W Fully Modular Power Supply Review
eTeknix.com posted Enermax MaxRevo 1350W Fully Modular Power Supply Review

Enermax is my personal favourite PSU manufacturer- and with good reason. Enermax uses the right kind of design approach which keeps them extremely popular with enthusiasts and professionals, with the focus primarily on quality while building useful features and a good aesthetic design around it. They have created some very different PSUs over the years, ranging from cheaper models such as the NAXN to the MaxRevo we will be looking at today. But take the price point as low as you like, you will still receive the quality which has gained Enermax such acclaim from reviewers and enthusiasts alike.

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G-Technology G-DRIVE slim HDD Review
TweakTown posted G-Technology G-DRIVE slim HDD Review

If you haven't heard of G-Technology just yet, you are not alone. The company started out as its own entity, but was later scooped up by Hitachi Global Storage Technology (GST). Now G-Tech serves at Hitachi's MAC storage department making products designed for use with MAC computers with an emphasis put on style as well as performance. Just very recently we looked at the G-DRIVE Mobile, a dual interface drive that uses USB 2.0 and FireWire 800.

Today we're looking at the G-DRIVE slim, a very thin portable drive that connects to your PC or MAC via USB 2.0. The slim uses a 7mm thin 5,400 RPM drive that allows the slim to be, well, very thin. Online we found two capacity sizes, 320GB and a larger 500GB model. Today we're looking at the 500GB model.

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Antec Solo II Review
XSReviews has a new review of the Antec Solo II case

I've been reviewing quite a few Antec products recently and they've all turned up pretty well so far. The last of my Antec product reviews is the Solo II case, the prequel of which has ended up as one of the most oft reviewed ones on the site.

This new edition updates the original design with a few extra features, while maintaing the parts that made it a good buy. At least that's the plan anyway. Let's see if Antec followed through.

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HotHardware Holiday Gift Guide: PC Components
HotHardware published a gift guide for PC components

The holidays are fast upon us and this final HotHardware Holiday Gift Guide will wrap up our series with what's near and dear perhaps to many of you DYI'ers out there - components. Whether the geek in your life is itching to rebuild that gaming rig or just starving for the right upgrade to relieve a system bottleneck, we have something for everyone here.

And hey, if that geek in your life is you, all the better. With all that selfless holiday shopping you're likely doing right about now, you deserve a little reward, right? Onward then. Let's round-up the good stuff.

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Video Perspective: Antec Eleven Hundred Case Review
PC Perspective posted Video Perspective: Antec Eleven Hundred Case Review

Antec has been making a fairly strong push back into the enthusiast market as of late by sponsoring specific gaming events like Blizzcon and by preparing and releasing new products in the company's very popular lines of chassis.  We have already taken a look at the Antec P280 case and in truth the Eleven Hundred we are looking at today is VERY similar to it.  It is constructed on the same base chassis but has some interesting changes on the doors, the front panel and cooling options.

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Intel DX79SI Motherboard Review
Hardware Secrets take a look at this socket 2011 motherboard from Intel based on the new Intel X79 chipset and targeted to the new Core i7 “Sandy Bridge-E” CPUs.

Intel has released two motherboard models for the new socket 2011 platform, the DX79SI and the DX79TO, targeted to the most high-end processor Intel offers for desktops today, the Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" models. Let's take a look at the DX79SI, which comes with three PCI Express 3.0 x16 slots.

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Thermalright Macho CPU Cooler Review
Hardware Secrets posted Thermalright Macho CPU Cooler Review

Today we are testing the Thermalright Macho, an enormous CPU cooler with six heatpipes and one 140 mm fan. Check it out!

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CM Storm Xornet Review
Overclock3D have just published a new article titled: CM Storm Xornet Review

Today we take a look at the latest CM Storm gaming mouse, the Xornet. At an affordable price, is it good value?

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PC Buyers Guide Christmas 2011
The Guru of 3D posted their PC Buyers Guide Christmas for 2011

Guru3D offers you their bi-annual PC Buyers Guide, this is the 2011 Winter edition. This article brings you a set of recommendations of products we feel are great components to build yourself a nice gaming rig. We go from low-end targated at gamers, to high-end for the enthusiast fragger.

We'll only cover the PC itself. Monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers are not included. We do this for brevity's sake, as the monitor alone would require its own guide, especially if I were to cover LCD monitors.

We target a system intended for gaming primarily while not spending heaps of money.

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ECS X79R-AX Intel LGA 2011 Review
techPowerUp posted a review on the ECS X79R-AX Intel LGA 2011

With the launch of Intel's latest well under way, ECS has sent us another warrior to battle the twin dragons of injustice, the ECS X79R-AX. Undoubtably the best board ECS has ever released, the ECS X79R-AX is ready for battle, after receiving training no ohter boards has. Set to finally banish the dragons back to the demise they planned for humanity, the ECS X79R-AX has hit the TechPowerUp testing battlefield.

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Catalyst 11.12 Windows 7 Driver Analysis
TweakTown posted Catalyst 11.12 Windows 7 Driver Analysis

I shouldn't be doing this at the moment; instead I should be packing for my holidays, but after discovering that we haven't missed a Catalyst Driver Analysis in seven years, I didn't want this to be the first one. So with that said, we'll move with haste and just get stuck into the performance side of things to see what exactly is going on with the latest driver set from AMD - the Catalyst 11.12. Quickly before we do that, though, we need to check out the release notes.

To be honest, going through the release notes, you're not going to see anything that stands out too much. We've got some improvements in some areas and as always we find ourselves with a decent list of resolved issues, but on the performance side of things we're not seeing a whole lot.

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Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7.5 Review
HardwareHeaven.com posted Nokia Lumia 800 with Windows Phone 7.5 Review

Launched recently the Lumia 800 is Nokia's first Windows based phone and one of the first handsets in a new wave of devices on the platform. With the latest OS, version 7.5 (Mango), we have been using the handset for a week now in day to day use, read on to find out our thoughts on the handset and OS.

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