News archives from 2004

These days, water cooling for CPU is quite normal as many cooling solution manufacturers keep on producing high end water cooler kits with progressively cheaper prices. However, water cooling for a hard drive is something quite new for many of us and there not as many manufacturers that are willing produce it probably due to the customers having less heat issues with the hard drive. Not so long ago, Asetek just introduced 2 types of hard drive water cooler; one is for CDROM bay and the other one is for FDD bay. In this review, we took a look at the FDD bay version; hard drive water cooler KT92-L20.

When I first started getting into the computer overclocking, Enermax was the highest recommended power supply by overclockers. It provided stable power and kept the systems running nice and smooth under heavy operations. After they earned their well deserved recognition, Enermax quieted down somewhat, and remained that way for about two years until the launch of the Noisetaker series. It was one of the first designed to have an adjustable fan and kept systems running nice and quiet. Today, Enermax continues the Noisetaker series with a few adjustments to comply with Intel''s new 12v v2.0 requirement.

We all know that the Geforce 6800 series is Nvidia''s new generation comeback kid. It is the first video card to support Shader Model 3.0. There were glimpses in the Far Cry v1.2 patch of what the new SM3.0 was capable of. Unfortunately, Ubisoft pulled it off due to bugs with ATI video cards. The majority of you know the 6800GT is possibly the best performance/price ratio video card today. It has the full 16 pipelines, just like the 6800 Ultra, but with a price tag $100 less. The only difference between the GT and the Ultra lies within the clock speeds. The slower clocks can easily be remedied by overclocking, provided that you have good cooling. This, of course, is good news to the enthusiasts. We''d all love to save that $100 and still get the performance. What about saving another $100 and going with the vanilla 6800? That, my friends, is what we''re going to find out.

The InsaneTek Case Modding Contest will end on October 15, 2004. This gives you fellow case modders approximately two weeks left before submission. Hurry before it''s too late. There are good prizes to be given away.

This Gigabyte GeForce FX5700 performs quite normally for the synthetic benchmarks but for the gaming benchmarks or real time applications, I would say that this Gigabyte GeForce FX5700 GV-N57128DP definately is a good card even though it has much slower memory rating speed. Besides, who cares about the synthetic benchmark score since real time practical application is much more important. Retailing at the price of USD118/RM450, I would strongly recommend those of you who are looking for a new graphics card to consider purchasing this one.

Gaming has been getting more popular over the past few years and should continue to do so into the future. With games looking better and needing more computing power to run high end hardware is normally needed. To accompany all of this expensive hardware peripheral companies have been putting a lot of time and effort into R&D to design better keyboards, mice, and other input devices. With these precision mice that use advanced optical engines comes the need for better mousepads.

Some people have claimed that once you get the bios flashing, the 6800 can open up the extra pipelines. These claims, it turns out, are true but the results are certainly not optimal. At best, when the process is successful you ll achieve 16 pipelines, but the driver would still be indicated as a mere 6800. Here, however, I will show you a much superior method. I will demonstrate that even a 6800LE, which has only eight pipelines, can be readily transformed into a full-fledged 6800Ultra.

Heatpipes have been the recent trend among heatsinks and Thermalright is no exception. The popular SP-94 and SP-97 both use heatpipe technology and have been top performers in their respective classes for a while now. Thermalright seems to have hit a size/weight limit with their copper heatsinks and have introduced a few aluminum products. They started with the ALX-800, which is like an aluminum version of the SLK-800. Then they released their first northbridge heatsink fan, the NB-1, which was also aluminum. Their latest releases, the XP-120 and XP-90, use heatpipe technology and the advantages of aluminum to differentiate themselves from the rest of the crowd.

If you re searching for the best mouse surface out there you won t be disappointed with the Razer eXact Mat. It s a large area to move your mouse on, it s constructed of anodized aluminum, it has very good rubber grips to anchor it down to your desk, and it s much easier to change sides than the fUnc 1030 because you just flip the whole mat. The mouse glides over both sides exceptionally, especially if your mouse has Teflon feet. The pad feels solid and natural, and the aluminum trim does not bother your hand or wrist at all...

After finishing all of the testing and looking back on everything I am quite impressed with this memory. Though I was able to run the memory at the specified speed with little to no problems I wouldn''t say that everything went according to plan. I was not able to get Comanche 4 to successfully complete even with my DDR voltage maxed out. I do feel that part of the problem in the overall equation was the motherboard being maxed out. I don''t think that my processor had anything to do with the problems since I was using an engineering sample and was able to lower the multiplier. So with all of these things being taken into consideration I would say this memory stands up pretty well. It would have been nice to be able to run the memory with latencies of 2-2-2-5 at DDR400 however since their specifications say nothing about this I won''t knock it too much. So I guess my one sentence summary of the memory would be as follows: If you have an overclockable Intel motherboard and processor and want to get your memory to 250MHz or faster this PC4000 from GeIL should do the job.