Water cooling was once a serious do-it-yourself hobby involving a lot of courage, hard work and patience. When we took a look at the Thermaltake Prowater recently, we were amazed just how accessible water cooling had become. It is no longer necessary to be a hard core enthusiast to enjoy the performance and silence associated with water cooling.

Today we’ll be taking a look at another compact, all-in-one water cooling kit—but this time from Swiftech. Founded back in 1994, Swiftech is a name very familiar to enthusiasts; especially those that have dabbled in water cooling over the years. Interestingly, Swiftech started as a company specializing in high-end UNIX imaging systems for its first few years and then moved into large heatsinks and thermo-electric coolers. It’s quite a shift, but hey, we’d much rather be playing with TECs than working with UNIX servers too! Since 1999, Swiftech has been growing steadily and then went public in 2005.

The kit we’ll be taking a look at today is the Swiftech Compact H2O-120; a very compact kit that hopes to make watercooling accessible to the average consumer. There are a few key features that really set the H2O-120 apart from other water cooling kits. First and foremost is Swiftech’s “Apogee Drive” pump, which literally combines the Apogee water block and the MCP350 pump. They didn’t just stop there either, they included a 120mm radiator with a built-in reservoir. In Swiftech’s words—”Water cooling has never been this easy!”

Let’s take a closer look at the H2O Compact and see how it fares in the Icrontic labs.

RiDATA, owned by RiTEK, has been a manufacturer of optical storage devices like CDs and DVDs since 1989 and recently ventured into the world of flash memory. This year they released the Ultra-S Plus line of 2.5″ form-factor solid-state drives. Today, I’m looking at the highest capacity model: the 128GB drive.

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Two weeks ago, I took a look at the NZXT Tempest case which was described as “an enthusiast’s steel tower.” NZXT has also sent us their Guardian 921 case, which I’ll be looking at today.

NZXT calls the Guardian 921 “Power for Gamers,” which I assume means that they consider this the right case for the gaming enthusiast. For many gamers, this case would indeed do the job well, but it comes with features that might make gamers scratch their heads.

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The Chill Pill

When it comes to portable media, the sad truth is that speaker quality generally goes out the window as speaker sizes decrease. Today’s small laptops prove this trend, as recent releases like the MacBook Air contain only a single speaker beneath the keyboard. While these solutions are inexpensive and gentle on battery life, they leave something to be desired when used for anything beyond system sounds.

While manufacturers have, in part, circumvented this issue with the prevalence of headphone jacks, what about situations where you don’t want to (or can’t) use headphones? Small Dog Electronics’ Chill Pill speakers were created for that purpose, and today Icrontic will be taking a look at them.

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While Tuniq is becoming a popular name in cooling, their name does not typically jump to mind when considering power supplies. All the same, this new-comer to the PSU market is hoping to make quite a splash. In a relatively short period of time, Tuniq has cranked out seven higher end power supplies ranging from 550W to 1200W. Tuniq recently sent us a 550W model from the Potency line, so let’s see how it fared in the lab!

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Tagan is a producer of power supplies, cases, and storage chassis for single and dual drives.  Icrontic was offered the opportunity to test the IcyBox IB-NAS4220-B, a network attached storage (NAS) chassis that supports two SATA drives and offers a long list of features. (more…)

In 2004, a group of gamers formed a company based on the idea that there wasn’t a company out there that catered specifically to PC gamer’s unique hardware needs. Calling the company NZXT, their stated mission is to design ”unique products catered for hardware enthusiasts and gamers.” They now design cases, mice, power supplies, and other accessories. Today I’ll be looking at the “Tempest” case. (more…)

There are usually two types of people looking for aftermarket video card cooling; those who want to overclock the card for additional performance, and those who want a quieter solution from the often times audible stock cooling solutions prevalent on many of today’s offerings. Whatever the case may be, Thermalright is there to help with its new T-Rad² GPU cooler. (more…)

Just recently awarded “Best Power Supply Manufacturer of 2008” by Custom PC, Corsair is a familiar name to those who have been building computers for any length of time. Known for years as a major player in the enthusiast computer memory industry, the company branched out in 2006 and began selling branded power supplies. While their TX- and VX-series supplies are single rail, their modular HX series is a multi-rail configuration, and today we will be looking at the mid-range 620W HX620W model. (more…)

Thermalright is at it again. Today, we’ll be taking a look at the third iteration of the hugely popular TRUE heatsink—the TRUE Copper. As you have probably already guessed, the TRUE Copper is a 100% copper version of the “Ultra Extreme”. (more…)

Lian Li has been known for years as a designer of quality aluminum PC enclosures. Many an enthusiast has built a performance rig inside a Lian Li tower case. This summer, Lian Li released two new HTPC enclosures that follow the company’s design principles of simplicity and efficiency. These offerings, the Lian Li PC-C36 MUSE and PC-C37 MUSE, offer similar layouts with slightly different feature sets. (more…)

My goodness, this game is good. I’m hesitant to say that I like — even love — this game because I didn’t buy into the hype of Far Cry 2 until, well, four days ago. I just couldn’t get excited about it. I was a huge fan of Far Cry when it was released, but that game’s bread and butter, the Crytek team, went on to develop Crysis without Ubisoft. To me, Crysis was the true successor to Far Cry. It was superior in every way to whatever Far Cry 2 could possibly accomplish, but Ubisoft has done a decent job with the property without Crytek. Is it a better shooter than Crysis? The two can hardly be compared. (more…)

There’s a lot of hype surrounding the upcoming Fallout 3 launch - but for those who haven’t played Fallout 1 or 2, have you given a thought to playing “catchup?” While finding Fallout 1 can be a chore, getting it to work on your Vista 64-bit install might be next to impossible. (more…)

Tagan is a manufacturer of PC power supplies, storage solutions, and cases. The company supplied us with a Monolize-CS tower case, an impressive creation that features two huge 250 mm side intake fans.

At first glance, the Monolize case seems to be the ideal case for an enthusiast on a budget. It fits into the market at the very attractive $100 USD price point while offering a unique cooling system, stylish design, and pleasing lighting.

Let’s delve into the details of the Monolize to see exactly how it lives up to Tagan’s claims. (more…)

This originally appeared in the Icrontic Blogs

I have a long history of not giving a damn about music organizers, online music stores, and especially any combination thereof. For 10+ years my digital music organization has consisted of Windows Explorer and right click > play in Winamp, and I’ve been reluctant to abandon the methods of obtaining music that have served me well: downloading music through not-so-legal channels and then supporting artists I like by buying their CD and ripping to disk. This has not only allowed me to listen to entire albums before spending my hard earned dough, but has also enabled me to keep copies of the music I love in something better than the encodings that sound like they’re being stepped on which most music stores offer. (more…)