Friday News

Why should I be interested in another window kit?” You are right; everyone and their dog has a window in their PC. I have a feeling what I do in this next article will be copied by some of those people, and perhaps some of their dogs! This IS a review of a window kit, but it is also my own personal mod. I’m going to briefly run through the process of installing the window, and then I will get to the mod… Think of it as having to eat your veggies before getting dessert. Just remember that you saw it first at ExtensionTech! Lets do this.

One of the main selling points of the Stealth is the 28A rating it carries… seemingly more than enough to power the myriad doo-dads I have in my box PLUS the 80W TEC I have on my Radeon9700Pro. The other is quality… there is nothing more awful than a cheap-ass OEM type “Deer” PSU [[>>Shudder ~ Quiver<<]] they are noisy, poor regulators, weak and given to spontaneous combustion (no foolin! One literally blew up on a thrifty neighbor of mine….) A good PSU also helps protect against line flutter, surges and has a reasonably long MTBF

Fast is never fast enough, but spending hard-earned coin is not always an option. Here’s a neat trick using several software mod hacks and patches that allow Radeon 9500 Pro users to realize a respectable speed boost – and it won’t void your warranty... Here’s a snip:

“Not too long ago there was a flurry of 9500 Mod articles and guides, most of which showed exactly which items to solder and move. However, as drool-worthy as they were, they did not take into account that a significant portion of the end-user crowd would faint at the mere mention of these procedures on their expensive cards. Thankfully, there are other options, and this is where this small article comes-in. For those of you who want an extra 20% performance without opening-up your case, read on!”

Although a late entrant in the CD-RW arm’s race, Samsung eventually popped a new drive out of the oven, only to challenge CPU utilization scores and offer a drive with near-silent operation. In this review, we pit it against the ever-popular Lite-On 52x drive to see if the cold-war is over yet... Here’s a snip:

“Both the Samsung SW-252B and Lite-On LTR-52246S have support for buffer underrun protection and the standard barrage of CD-RW features. However, both products are aimed at a different segment of the marketplace. The Lite-On drive has superior reading speeds, but at the expense of twice the CPU utilization percentage of the Samsung SW-252B and does so while creating a small racket. Whereas the SW-252B and its 8MB cache was able to prevent the once-common buffer underrun error under extensive use of available system resources... all while emitting far less drive noise. The Samsung SW-252B is late to market, but the drive brings peace and quiet to those that seek quieter sytems without an impact on overall drive performance.”

Are you looking to change the color of your LEDs on your case? Why settle on only one color when you can get five with a Color Changing Led from Amk Computers.