Wednesday News Part 2

You get a small manual, manual might be a stretch, let's just say the packaging has the manual printed on it. Of course 4 screws to put the fan controller in a 5.25" drive bay, too bad you have to buy the nexus seperate (there's my dry humor again, darnit, the nexus is indeed included). The product comes with a heap of cables: 2 pieces of the 4-pin to 3-pin, and 2 pieces of the 3-pin to 3-pin, a power cable is included as well.

Impressed. This Vantec Intel Pentium 4 heatsink keeps up with the best heatsinks available today shown here with only a 2 degrees approximate Celsius difference between this Vantec AeroFlow VP4-C7040 and the super heatsink, the Thermalright SK7. The Vantec AeroFlow VP4-C7040 combination of using the Y.S.Tech TMD fan with its superior air flow over conventional heatsink fans and the ingenious heatsinks fin layout Vantec have designed a winner.

It was a little strange that we managed a higher OC with a 15x multiplier, so my guess it wasn't the CPU or the motherboard, but rather, it was the PSU. At 180W, there isn't a whole lot of juice available, so I removed all the connections and tried a Thermaltake Purepower 430W instead. Our end result was a 7x150FSB overclock.

Each of the fan controller’s submitted performed outstanding and in some cases even blew me off my feet. I was surprised that some of these controllers were able to do as well as they did – at some points during the roundup I did have my doubts! Judging on ease of installation, best performance, best looking and what’s included (to make installation easier), I would have to declare the overall winner of this roundup the Vantec Four Fan Controller. Not only did I have high expectations coming into this controller’s review, I was not any more surprised to see that it did exceptionally well as far as RPM readings go.

The Sagestar YPbPr VGA Box allows you to connect your Microsoft Xbox console to any PC VGA monitor, giving you an enhanced, much brighter video output along with practical use (no need for a separate television for your Xbox).

The unit is compatible with all PAL and NTSC region consoles (50/60Hz) and allows you to easily switch between your PC and VGA monitor through a simple on/off switch. Alternatively you can just connect it to a spare VGA monitor (as I have for this review) for video output.

There comes a time in every modders life when he/she needs more power, whether it's to light up yet another blue cathode, boot that new 120Gb hard drive or power that water pump. A friend of mine turned to me with this very problem and in two hours I'd solved it. Now I'm going to show you how you can get more power into your PC without breaking the bank by buying a 500W power supply and loads of molex splitters. The Answer is of course...Dual PSU's?

Well, we've had a release of a new DirectX API late last year, with the introduction of DirectX9, and we've had DirectX9 capable hardware much before that in the form of the Radeon 9500/9700 and the upcoming GeForce FX series, isn't it about time we saw a new version of everyone's favourite 3D benchmark? Well, as if on cue, Futuremark Corporation (formerly MadOnion) have released 3DMark2003 and Beyond3D has been given the opportunity to test the software early.