Tuesday Newsies part 2

Over the past years many companies and modders have strived to engineer unique, yet functional keyboards. This has been attempted by placing glow wire underneath the keys. This has its downsides: the keys are not clear so it glows around them and not through them, you have an extra cable sticking out of your keyboard, not to mention the unprofessional look caused due to the uneven lighting. To help us with our dilemma Zippy has introduced us with an EL backlit keyboard, the EL-610.

I am sure that many of you have heard of a harddrive cooler before, but most pre-made ones cost up to 40 dollars! Usually these can be seen by companies like Thermaltake, Enermax and many others, but I have constructed a cheap way to make the same product. The total cost of this project ranges between $10-$15, but it's well worth the money - especially if you run scsi harddrives which can often run hot and increase case temperatures...get some air flowing on those harddrives and save that lifespan.

While running the DDR400 gauntlet, I have to say that it has been a chore finding the appropriate ram that will run at DDR400 and run without problems. To test this further, I requested a sample of DDR433 PC3500 Enhanced Latency memory from OCZ Technologies to test whether indeed my problems were due to the limitations of the P4X400 chipset I was testing on, or whether the memory was the cause of my performance problems. Did OCZ's representative sample of DDR433 fix my problems? Well my friend, read on.....

So you need a 40mm fan? That wimpy fan on your chipset not cutting it for you? Haha. Then you have to come see this 40mm Sanyo Tornado fan. While I was just going to do a review of it, I thought, boy, that would be boring. So I tried to spice it up a bit by using it in an old 5 1/4" Hard Drive cooler bay I had laying around. Although I couldn't take temps with the old 40mm fans before I gave it the big upgrade, just wait till you see how it dropped the Hard Drive temperature!

When people think about what needs to be cooled, they tend to think about the CPU, GPU, and even the system chipset, heck even the power supply gets some love. Can you think of what other device produces a good amount of heat? Believe it or not, the hard drive gets fairly warm just sitting there spinning around. Heat generated from the HDD can cause two major problems, first is it can cause the rest of the system to be warmer, and second, it can shorten the lifespan of your HDD. Today, we'll be looking at a brand new product from Cremax, which is designed to help keep your precious HDD cool - The Icy Dock Bodyguard 525 MB228.

Out of the box, the X-Sonic Mid-Tower Case is very well constructed and built with an aluminum based case chassis that is 0.80mm thick. The case measures approximately 395mm (D) x 205 mm (W) x 420mm (H) and supports all Flex, Micro, Full ATX motherboards. The entire exterior is silver coloured with the main focus on the front bezel design and pre-modified side panel window. The front bezel is very stylish with a great futuristic type look and is protected by a plastic overlay. The highlight for this case is the inclusion of a pre-modified window on the left side panel which is secured using a series of white plastic push pins.

Once the package was opened you can see the components below. The blue Inverter powers the cathode and is controlled by the switch below that fits in an empty PCI slot cover on the back of your case. The fan can be attached via a 3 pin or 4 pin connector. The really cool thing about this setup is that you can add a second cold cathode tube to the inverter. The 3 pin connector also has an RPM sensor.