Wednesday News part 2

The Vexx Alien Limited Edition surpassed many of my expectations of what premodded cases would be like. The construction of the case was fairly sturdy yet lightweight. The paint job, window, and fan mods are absolutely top notch. Having the LCD temperature displays are a definitely plus. Put all that in along with USB 2.0 support and a cathode kit and you've got a really nice package

Ah cases. Remember the good ol' days when we had desktop cases? The kind that you placed your monitor on? Well cases sure have changed a lot since that age. Now we have micro, mini, mid, and full towers; aluminium cases, with windows, and without sides, amongst many other features. As "case-modding" is becoming much more common, there is a continual drive to stay unique, dare to be different! Have you ever thought of having a completely transparent case? Behold the beauty known as the acrylic case...

The first thing you notice about this case is how over-popular it is, and how it seems to be going out of style. This may be true, but this Dragon still keeps its attitude. It's stylish door and wicked ventilation beckon you. I had ordered the generic beige mid tower, but upon opening of the box, I realized that beige isn't that bad of a color. Most everyone has gotten so tired of the generic beige and have gone to a variety of other colors. Despite the hatred of beige these days, the Dragon still seemed just as menacing under that light brown coat.

The new Microsoft Optical Mouse - Does it improve over it's predecessor? Or is it just another mouse? Avg Joe Geek takes a look at Microsoft's follow up to their optical line of mice.

23 inches (deep) by 17.25 inches (high) by 8.75 inches wide, the Landrover is not a small case. At almost 6 inches longer than my standard Inwin steel cases, this monster can take up a fair amount of real estate. Considering its target audience (the SOHO server market), size certainly doesn't matter as much. The frame is steel as are the black powder-coated side panels. Both panels remove quite easily (though some elbow-grease is required) and the motherboard-side panel needs to be removed when you install drives. The top is dimpled plastic and can be removed quite easily (for case mods, of course!). The sides offer a lot of room for window mods, etc. but as you'll see in a few moments, you have to cut VERY carefully.

The Irock! Bling player looks like any other standard CD player out on the market. We found that the Bling player was very light for such a packet unit. It was very easy to carry around even with the batteries installed into the system. The first thing we tried was FM Tuner. We used both the unit and the remote to test the tuner and we were very pleased with the quality of sound. The ear bud head phones sound was very rich and smooth.

With dirty cheap memory capable of running +200Mhz showing up everywere, it might be a good idea to give your 533FSB P4 the memory bandwith it needs. Most of the popular 845PE Intel boards use the 4:5 FSB/MEM ratio with an 533FSB P4 inserted, here's a trick to make it use the 3:4 divider so you can make full use of your memory.

BFG sent me their "budget" video card called the Asylum GeForce 4 Ti4200. This card had a few surprises that I didn't expect to see, one of them being an 8x card in a 4x box! Here's a clip: "It's a little hard for me to consider a video card with so many features as a budget card, though. Not everyone has $400 to spend on a video card and that's where the ti4200 comes in. Coming in at under half of the cost of a top of the line video cards, the price to performance ratio is really putting the ti4200's in the sweet spot."