Hardware Roundup

All the reviews fit to print

SemiAccurate hereby breaks in something that we intend to be your first choice in online hardware review coverage. At SemiAccurate you’ll find a one-stop selection of red-hot hardware reviews, starting right now. We’ll be gathering together here the best of what we’ve found online around the web and giving it to you straight up.

SO LET THE GAMES BEGIN…

We’ll start off with the Zalman CNPS 10X Extreme CPU Cooler. It’s extreme AND it’s Zalman… that kind of raises the bar, right? Well, it did, as the results obliterate the competitors.

Timelines are Acer’s current branding for thin and light notebooks, and Laptop Magazine got a 5810T in the shop. If you’re willing to sacrifice a bit of performance to get extreme battery life – without paying through the nose – this is it.

OCaholic is a Swiss site that happens to have a good hardware turnover. Today it’s published a review on the Corsair HX 850W PSU. This PSU claims a 90% efficiency (unheard of, really) and sports enough SATA plugs to choke a server’s HDDs. Interesting little beast, it is.

Gaming is usually adverse to “low spending”, but LANCool might have a different opinion on that. They’ve plugged their Dragonlord PC-K56 budget gaming tower at ProClockers. It looks, and plays, the part very well. Get yours for under $65.

Hardware Zone, halfway across the world, goes the opposite way with a very pricey SilverStone Raven RV02 case. The ominous box pumps air vertically rather than across your case, and as hot air rises… Hey, presto! It works!

Noctua carries a hard-earned reputation for cooling performance, although they are European and hard to find in shops. Overclockers Online gave their NF-S12B FLX 120mm fan a listen. Noise-reduction and dead silent would sum it up…

OC Workbench brings a lot of motherboard reviews to the table. This one of the Asus M3A785GXH-128M is a winner. DX 10.1, advanced HD decoding, and a bit more memory versatility with sideport and DDR3 support…

If you’ve got a strong back, and a MacBook or iPhone/iPod, you probably would like to read this review on the HyperMac External MacBook battery. This external battery plugs into your power port and in theory will power your Mac for the whole day. It also has a USB port to power up USB devices…

Corsair’s attempt at an enthusiast case got aired at Legit Reviews today. The Obsidian Series 800D brings to the table lots of good features like cooling zones and powerful venting, but also plenty of room for you to build on. Pricey, yes, but not prohibitive-pricey.

BenQ, having almost become extinct, has returned to its origins of projectors and flat panels. The BenQ G2220HD, which you can see at DevHardware, gets you Full HD resolution on a 22-inch panel, with low viewing angles but a low low price.

ThermalTake’s Element G case made it to the pages of OCIA. A lot of thought has gone into the case, according to the review, and it oozes quality. You can pick one up for $149.99 if you like, but don’t take our word for it… read the review.

G.Skill is earning its rep for being a tough mean lean memory packaging machine. It’s stuck 3x2GB of DDR3-2000 memory (at a low 1.65v) into the Trident F3-16000 CL9 tri-channel pack (note the subtle “trident” branding) and sent some off to Hardware Canucks.

Media Players are a curious thing, they’re a dime a dozen, but only a handful seem to deliver a good match of file-format support, GUI and specs. Tweak Town taped a video review on the Astone Media Gear AP-100 1080p Media Player for everyone to see.

Asus is still peddling Nvidia wares, like the ENGTS 250 1GB Dark Knight (definitely no relation to the movie) graphics card, it’s sent one to BigBruin for testing. The card’s custom cooling keep it chilled and silent even under load.

1.5 kilowatts of power might sound like overkill, but by reading Fudzilla’s review on the SilverStone Strider ST1500 modular PSU, you might just need one for some extreme Crysis Warhead gaming. You can actually see a PSU suck 900+ watts in this review.

Overclock 3D posted an article that will make the Mac-heads giddy with delight, it’s a basic guide to cloning your MacBook’s HDD to an SSD. So clone it before Charlie comes a-knockin’ hacksaw in hand…

Last, but surely not least…

AMD’s successful comeback into the CPU wars had another page added to it this day as the company intro’d the Phenom II X4 965BE. Now, we’ve gathered a ton-and-a-half of reviews about it, but the conclusion seems to be pretty… well… conclusive: it doesn’t really compete with Core i7, but rather the Core 2 Quad family, and even then it loses out most of the time. It’s a step up, but that’s about it.

Considering the TDP on this processor and the fact that it’s a Black Edition, you might think it’s a hard sale… and we agree. On the bright side, you can pick up a 955BE much cheaper now and overclock it about as much as the 965BE… *sigh* here we go…

Overclockers Club

Benchmark Reviews

Technic 3D (Germany)

PureOC

Club OC

AMD Zone

Techspot

Guru of 3D

I4U

Tweakers.net (Netherlands)

Computerbase (Germany)

Extremetech

Elite Bastards

Hot Hardware

TBreak

Chile Hardware (Chile)

PC Games Hardware

Driver Heaven

Madbox PC (Spain)

TweakTown

Anandtech

PC Perspective

Firing Squad

Techware Labs

Xbit Labs

Bjorn 3D

Hardware.fr (France)

Tom’s Hardware

Hexus.net

Inside HW

Legit Reviews

S|A

 

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