Monday News bitsies part 2

The Panaflo fan unit came in a nice little package with sufficient bubble wrap to protect it while in transit. The fan appeared as basic as it can possibly get. Aside from the Panaflo sticker on the unit, I would not have been able to tell it by sight alone from any other generic 92mm fan. But Panaflo has a reputation for being fans of the highest quality, so I was excited to see just how competent this fan was.

So - after struggling with several site downtimes throughout our year and some change as a site, the MEMBER count has reached 1000! You have been thanked a million times over by the rest of the community and the TwistedX staff. For this very reason, we are thanking with some gifts from one of modding's fastest shops around... Extreme Alterations!

“The mouse, the little rodent that sits next to our computer. It makes our lives a million times easier. The little rodent also gives us the ability to play games. And, in this case, the little rodent is extremely ugly. When modders want to mod something, the mouse usually doesn’t come to mind. It’s always the case, the optical drives, or even the monitors. Mice are often left out of the picture, however…

For me, a mouse mod seemed perfect for my system. It blends well with the rest of my components. I’m attempting to mod the mouse by drilling holes in it that will shine through with the light from the LED. So obviously, this mod needs an optical mouse. Next I will paint the mouse completely black. The third step I added an LED to my existing one, so there were 2 LEDs inside my mouse. And finally I will add a few glass rods inside to beam the light to the outside, as seen to the right. This mouse mod is extremely easy and costs very little money.”

Mention NIKE to me and I think of sweaty women in tight shorts running around the park, but enough of my fantasies. Recently a surprise product landed on my desk, which is a collaboration between the giant of the sports world, NIKE and the giant of the electronics world, Phillips. Both companies teamed up to produce the new NIKE PSA range of portable sports orientated music devices. These devices are a little different from the normal MP3 players we have looked at here before as they are firmly aimed at the sporty type. They feature splash proof constructions and lots of neat little touches that we will look at in the next section.

OCAddiction takes a look at the new ABIT IC7-G Max2 Advance motherboard based on Intel’s latest 875P Canterwood chipset. With an 800MHz FSB, Dual Channel DDR, AGP 8X, native SATA support and plenty of other options, the Canterwood boards are looking to secure their spot for the desktop performance crown. Let’s take a look.

“Here is where the IC7-G excels over all other current solutions. You can see that running in Single Channel mode the IC7-G is running only slightly faster than most solutions while the BH7 at a 4:5 CPU/Memory ratio is surpassing it in memory bandwidth performance. However once we kick into DC mode the IC7-G leaves everything else behind; by quite a bit I might add. Showing 5351/5353 in memory is nothing short of incredible. Clearly Intel has done their homework in implementing Dual Channel and it certainly shows here.”

Whenever I think of a good cooler, Copper and noise usually go hand in hand and spring to mind. Well, Zalman, known for their micro-fin silent coolers, have released their latest incarnation – the CNPS 7000-Cu. Pentium4 overclockers and silentPC fanatics will really dig its performance AND utter lack of noise...
Here’s a snip:

“The Zalman CNPS 7000-Cu is a stylish HSF combination that lives up to its claims of providing you with good performance and low noise. It’s nice to have the option of dropping many Decibels of noise and not have to equate that to losing the same amount of cooling performance. While the Zalman CNPS 7000-Cu is not the top performing cooler I have used, it comes close and the reduction in noise pollution coming from my case makes this a cooler I plan to use for a long time.”

If you are looking for a keyboard that is less expensive and has more features than the Eluminx, is a lot easier to use than a flexible keyboard when you are on the go and want to do it in style, look a little closer at Bytecc’s Zippy EL-610 Keyboard. Just make sure that your eyes are bigger than your hands as you’ll have some issues during long-term daily use.