Monday afternoon edition

When I think of the name "Vantec" the only thing that use to come to mind was fans, heat sinks, and other cooling devices. Likewise, when I heard "Thermal Monitoring" or "Fan Control" Ventec is not the company I would have thought of. Well, that's changed now, with Vantec's latest product, The Nexus.

In one sleek device, Vantec has managed to bring you a CPU fan controller, three thermal sensors, an LCD readout, and to top it off, they even threw in two USB 2.0 and one FireWire/1394 ports. If that wasn't enough they've also added interchangeable faceplates to give your computer a whole new look.

I have here, one of the most innovative and original product's that I've seen as of lately. We are going to be looking at the next newest thing since the cold cathodes became popular, a rounded IDE cable that lights up! I'm not quite sure why no one ever thought of this before, but this truly is an awesome IDE cable. Modders have lit up everything from their CD Rom drive to their entire case, but I'm pretty sure no one has come up with an idea like this. Lets move on to find out what this product is all about..

Whether you are a hardkore over clocker or just want to keep your machine running at stable temps you are probrably concerned about airflow. What most of us will do is add a bunch of fans and cut holes all over the place, this is, without a doubt, the way to go, but if you point 4 fans in one same direction and then stick a standard ribbon IDE cable in front of them then all your cooling efforts will be ruinned. So the best way to go about it is to get smaller and tighter cables: Round IDE Cables. They allow more air flow and are more flexive, but this is not your typical round cable, its a round cable with EL wire in it!

When the Pentium 4 was released, early adopters were stung by the form factor change. Normally, a new motherboard would be in order, but we look at a cheaper and easier alternative.

"The question you need to ask yourself is if you have an older setup, is it more worthwhile to do a complete system overhaul, or to tryout an upgrade kit? Normally, I'd say you're better off changing everything if your system is very old, but the P4/i850 still has a lot of life left, and as I've said, parting with all that expensive RAMBUS ram would be a waste. Still, I was curious to see if the performance gained in a CPU upgrade, motherboard remaining the same, would be worthwhile."