Tuesday News

After covering the numerous good features of the BT-80 as well as the design flaws, you may be having mixed opinions at this point, allow me to explain further some advantages to acrylic cases and then give the final word. No matter which acrylic case you may decide on, the fact remains that it is nearly impossible to hide ALL wiring. Keep this in mind as well as the fact that acrylic does scratch easily, so keep the box for transporting it! To prove my point, I took a penny to the bottom side of the case and with a fair amount of pressure, was able to leave a nice scratch. Aside from this, advantages of any acrylic case include the fact that you will have something different from the normal metal chassis and window

As watercooling solutions become more and more popular, more and more commercially made products are being released. After my first water cooling attempt, I must say that I couldn’t be more pleased with the temperatures as well as sound levels of my computer. Since then, I have expanded my list of “used and abused watercooling gear”. I have played with tygon tubing, a dual fan radiator, as well as an innovatek graph-O-matic. Today, I have yet another radiator to look at, the Hardware Labs Black Ice Xtreme.

The X-Factor is available in two different fan configurations and this particular review sample was configured with an aluminium bladed fan. The footprint on this fan is low profile measuring 70mm x 70mm x 15mm and is manufactured by EverCool. The 70mm EverCool fan model#EC7015H12CA is rated for 12VCD and runs at 4000 RPM, pushing 32.45 CFM @ 30.0 dBA. The external housing is composed of aluminium while the fan blades have been painted silver to colour match. AeroCool advises that this model features a "magnetic vapo bearing" fan with a life expectancy of 80,000 hours.

There are currently three major Wireless LAN standards that operate using Radio Frequency technology. These are, in order of introduction on the market, 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g. (Yes, b comes before a. Go back to elementary school if you didn’t pick that up the first time around). The 802.11b and 802.11g standards run at a 2.4GHz frequency, while 802.11a uses a 5GHz frequency to transmit data. This was one of the main problems back in the day, because 802.11a and 802.11b WLAN can’t connect to each other, but 802.11g can interoperate with 802.11b networks. 802.11b is limited to 11MBPs (22MBPs with special Texas Instruments DSP, which is named 802.11b+) while 802.11a can achieve speeds of 108MBPs. 802.11g can achieve speeds of 54MBPs. In this article, we will review four different 2.4GHz 802.11b products from D-Link:
DWL-520+ PCI Adapter
DWL-650+ Cardbus Adapter (for laptops and media stations)
DWL-810 Ethernet to Wireless Bridge
DWL-900AP+ Access Point

Generally speaking, heat pipe is a vacuum tube filled with a low vaporising point liquid. The liquid absorbs heat and evaporated to the other end of the tube. The vapour is cooled by external means, e.g. fans, and condenses to the bottom end of the tube by gravity

Spire-coolers have a cool AMD heatsink-fan combo that sports a thermal sensor that controls the fan speed!