Stephen

ASRock X58 SuperComputer @ X-Bit Labs

“What do we know ASRock mainboards for in the first place? Unique technical solutions and low price. What will we remember ASRock X58 SuperComputer for? Well, I believe it will be the unusual “Powered eSATAII/USB” connector and that’s about it. In my opinion, they had to give up four PCI Express x16 slots and leave only two of them, because most users will still use only one anyway. Making the layout a little simpler this way could help lower the price of this board.”

Sapphire HD 4670 Ultimate Edition @ OC Club

“The heatsink used on the Ultimate Edition HD 4670 is a passive design. This means that its sole means of discharging the thermal load, is to rely on the temperature differential between the air in the chassis and the heatsink itself. Of course better case airflow will allow the heatsink to be more effective. Sapphire has come up with creative solutions for cooling ATI based video cards over the past year with the Toxic and Atomic series of video cards.”

BFG GeForce GTX 295 H20 @ Guru3D

“BFG is the first to bring a liquid-cooled GeForce GTX 295 to the market. As extravagant liquid cooling a GeForce GTX 295 really is, the end results in cooling performance, gaming performance and the incredible aesthetics a product like this offers is extraordinary. The guys of Danger Den provided a massive copper block to sit in-between the two GPUs and chill them down to very nice temperatures.”

XFX GTX285 Black Edition @ OC Club

“The XFX GTX285 Black Edition was the fastest single GPU option in all of the tests, minus Fallout 3, and even put up a good fight with the dual-GPU options. The fan on this card was not loud, with an idle speed of 40% and maximum of 56% under load for measured fan speed. The card never ran over 80 Celsius at load, and idled in the high 30s.”

Crucial Ballistix Tracer DDR3-1600 @ Hexus

“The self-titled ‘memory experts’ launched a Ballistix line of high-performance memory a while back, primed to appeal to the enthusiast who’d usually look toward Corsair and OCZ for cutting-edge RAM. Ballistix was augmented with flashy (literally!) Tracer memory, which added some bling. Now, that Tracer series is available in three colours with LEDs to match.”

OCZ Platinum 6GB DDR3-1600 @ PureOC

“Today we’re looking at a set OCZ Platinum 6GB triple channel DDR3-1600 modules, sticks that appear to offer great aesthetics at a great price. But what about performance? We think Performance is King, so we’ll see if the missing link in the equation here is indeed missing or not with these OCZ Platinum sticks.”

OCZ Tri-Channel 1600 Platinum @ Bjorn3D

“With the onslaught of Intel’s newest chipset and CPU’s giving us users more memory bandwidth but also increasing the number of channels to the memory. Its only natural for memory manufacturers to follow suit with this newer standard. OCZ has been quiet on this front for some time, but not any more. We at Bjorn3D are going to be looking at a set of Tri Channel memory from OCZ technologies, the Platinum 1600 7-7-7-24 timings DDR3 Tri Channel memory.”

Intel Q8300 @ Neoseeker

“The Q8300 is easy on your hydro bill, and gives pretty darn good performance for the buck. Its overclocking is limited by the 1333MHz FSB, but you are extremely likely to be able to run at 3.375GHz (450×7.5) on any decent motherboard, and that is 175MHz faster than the stock speed of the extremely expensive QX9770.”

AMD Phenom II X4 810 & X3 720 @ TechGage

“Phenom II may have just launched last month, but AMD didn’t want to waste time in following-up with their first AM3-based processors. We’re taking a look at two, including the X4 810 and X3 720 ‘Black Edition’. Both offer great performance at their respective price-points, but the X3 became the more appealing chip, thanks to its overclocking ability.”

WD Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB @ FutureLooks

“Though you can almost get that with the many 640GB 2-platter models that dot the landscape, true performance comes with drives like the VelociRaptor or any of the solid state drives out there. Western Digital is hoping to break that trend with their “Black Edition” Caviar hard drives.”