Wednesday News part 3

The CpuMate DAA-11500 seems to have all it needs to perform well. With 40 cfm fan and the many thin copper fins, this HSF has great potential. When one looks at the design of the heat sink, you will notice many design similarities to the Thermalright SLK-800. The way the fins are separated by having a part of one fin bent over to separate it from the next fin is the main characteristic I'm referring to. Another characteristic the DAA-11500 has with the SLK-800 is how thin the copper fins are...

ThermalTake has recently upgraded their line of tower cases to include the new and improved Xaser III series with the V2000A Aluminum Super Tower shown here, being their top of the line model.

OCAddiction checks out The ABIT NF7-S nForce2 Revision 1.2 Motherboard. Arguably one of the best nForce2 Motherboards currently on the market, the OCA Crew put this mobo through the paces comparing it to a KT400 and spilling the beans on overclockability. One to keep on your shortlist of AMD setups? Lets take a look.

"The biggest problem with the VIA KT400 chipset is that it lacks a 1/6 PCI divider, effectively leaving bus speeds of 200MHz or higher unattainable. With the release of the nForce2 chipset all of that was supposed to change. Did it? You bet it did! The addition of the 6/3, 6/4, and 6/6 PCI dividers opened up a world that until now was not possible using the popular VIA chipsets."

A hard drive rack is a device that allows you to remove your hard drive and put it into another computer. By storing your files on a hard drive that is in a hard drive rack you can bring the files you use at work, home. You could also use a hard drive rack to swap out operating systems. If you setup one hard drive for you and all your important documents; then setup a different hard drive just for the kids, then you wont have to worry about your kids messing anything up. Any reason why you would need a hard drive rack would be the right reason to check out the MobleMaxx Aluminum HD Rack. Some of the reasons you will want to use a hard drive rack is to have quick access to your hard drive, security, or hot swap abilities. You would expect all of this to be incorporated in a boring beige box with one of those flimsy handles on them. Now we can expect to see the best of the best in looks and performance.

From the results above, Nvidia's nF2 chipset provides 7~12% improvement under gaming condition (when GFX card is not the bottleneck) and 5~6% improvement under business tasks. Currently, Via has no retail chipset to compete with Nvidia's nF2. However, we've learnt that Via just announced its KT-400A with an improvement memory sub-system and is said to be on the same performance level as the nF2. For now, AMD DDR users can wait until the KT-400A hits the shelf or the users can grab any nF2 boards recommended below.