Friday Reviews part 2

If you like to show off your hardware and a window just doesn’t cut it; you need a clear case. Xoxide has added a new twist to clear case production. Xoxide has made their case out of UV reactive acrylic. Let’s move on

Also included is a small manual and a small pack of white silicone grease. The small manual gave absolutely no instructions for mounting the heat sink to a socket A motherboard. I found that to be quite disappointing. To attach the 2 spring-and-screw clip, I had to remove the copper fin block to gain enough clearance to screw the two clips to the aluminum base. This process of the installation required a little thinking. I had to carefully remove the copper fin block. Once the copper fin block was removed however, antifreeze spilled quite easily

There are three fan controllers from left to right. I like the quality of this controller. When the fan controller knob is set off there is no leakage, the fan is off. The 4th knob from left to right is the light control. If you look closely you can see a speaker icon on top of the controller. Yes this controller can be set to being sound sensitive. I also liked the green led glow surrounding the knobs

There are currently many fan controllers on the market. Some of them sport a lightshow of LED's, knobs, and buttons, while others are plain, simple, and just do the job of quieting down case fans to a bearable level. The Vantec NXP-201 is one of Vantec's older fan controller offerings, but it has stuck around amidst fancier controllers and held its own. Today we'll take a look at the NXP-201 and see just why it has lasted so long in a market where newer products constantly shuffle and fade out

Fan Controllers - you know them, you might even use them. They are those case bay products with switches or dials that slow your noisy fans down or shut them off. The premise is you are able to use your computer quietly while writing reports, but when you need maximum cooling power for things like gaming, you turn your fans on/up even though it is a bit noisy. Most are 5.25-inch bay products, but few have occupied the spot where your 3.5-inch floppy drive used to be. Enter the Enermax 3.5-inch Fan Controller

I was able to run the Golden Dragon PC3200 Dual Channel at 280MHz front side bus with a 5:4 CPU:Memory ratio CAS 2.5-7-4-4 Game Accelerator set to Auto and at 293MHz front side bus with a 3:2 CPU:Memory ratio CAS 2-6-3-3 and Game Accelerator set to Street Racer. I could not run this memory at the F1 Game Accelerator setting or at CAS 2-5-2-2 even at the default 200MHz bus speed. These settings were verified stable with Memtest86 v3.0.

I, for one, love the panel with the design reversed. The only downfall I am monitoring is the moisture vent in the inside of the case now. So far she seems pretty dry and I haven't noticed any condensation inside. It's not that big of a pressure and change in internal humidity of the case

As for this TV tuner card in comparison with the TV wonder USB edition, we can see a slight improvement. Since you'll be using a monitor don't expect a crystal clear image in full screen mode, but it'll still turn out pretty good. In windows mode the quality is perfect, which even surprised me! You can constantly work with the application and it won't lag, only when you have an application minimized and you maximize it that you're going to see interference in your TV windows screen

Let me point it out once again that the FX 5900 and RADEON 9800 PRO cards are approximately equal. It's for you to choose. In future complicated shader-filled games ATI's cards can have more prospects, but when should we expect such games? When the FX 5900 and R9800PRO become the mainstream solutions? At that time the difference will be lacking at all. Besides, the pricecut rates should be also accounted for. If the FX 5900 is cheaper than the RADEON 9800 PRO, the choice won't be so difficult