Tuesday News

The products we're using are a bit on the extremist side. The pump is one that pushes quite a bit of water, and was recommended for the radiator we're using. As mentioned, the radiator can support 4 120mm fans. In our setup, we have two pushing and two pulling air through the radiator fins. This almost guarantees maximum cooling, and because the radiator measures in at 10.75 x 5.25 x 1.77 inches, a strong pump is needed. The inner copper core uses 9.44 inches of 2-pass double row flat tubes.

Installing this radiator can be a troublesome battle for small cases. It's huge, folks, and it is stressed that this unit be firmly mounted. The case we're using is very wide, tall, and has pre-cut 120mm fan holes on the rear of the case. This allowed us to install all four 120mm fans for optimal performance. Note that you will have a large radiator with two 120mm fans sticking out the rear. This is made possible by pre-drill holes found on both sides of the radiator's frame, making installation easier--provided you have the room in the first place.

OCAddiction has the newly released Serial ATA hard drive from Maxtor, the DiamondMax Plus 9 SATA 160GB drive with 8MB of cache on our test bench and we put it thru the wringer. After a disappointing first showing from SATA drives, we were excitied to check out what Maxtor had to offer. Were we disappointed? Let's just say that with improvements like this, SATA is here to stay!

Here's a quick blurb from the review:
"This review is ending the opposite of what I had expected from the outset. I know that a reviewer is supposed to begin every review unbiased, but after seeing the yields from earlier SATA drives, my expectations were relatively low. This Maxtor drive has flat out impressed me at every turn."

All in all, the R9500 64MB is a bit too expensive for its stock performance but if the card can be successfully modified into a R9500 Pro then it offers a very good performance/price ratio. This is especially true if users want to use FSAA and anisotropic filtering.

This new generation of Pentium 4 processors that have 800mhz FSB are due out shortly. People are buying these boards now so when they have the ability to upgrade their processor, they will already have the board of the future. The question is do these boards really support 800mhz FSB? Unless the Intel processor is unlocked, the consumer will never know until he/she has already spent their money on one of these boards! Today we show you the truth!..

Cooler Master kicks out a new AMD cooler, which uses a different kind of fan than most people are accustomed to. The performance of the package was quite surprising.

"Both the X-Dream and the Swiftech, with fans at full speed (constant in the case of the Swifty) are idling at 45C. The Aero7 quite literally blows them away with a 4 degree difference, dropping to just 41C. The last time I was this surprised with a HSF was when I upgraded my Thermalright SK7 and Delta assembly to the Swiftech, which not only dropped the noise significantly but also the temperature."

Starting off with a case mod accessory review. installing a Cold Cathode light kit in your case is definitely one of the easiest case mods you can do. Only thing you need is a window kit so that you can enjoy the beauty of the light at work. SVC Does a great job on ensuring that the light kit comes intact upon delivery packed into a cylindrical tube which is then covered in bubble wrap. I give SVC 2 thumbs up for making customer satisfaction one of thier main priorities.