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…)

It seems that most enthusiasts cross the line at one time or another. It is the point when fans alone just won’t cut it any longer. I still remember my first faithful dive into liquid cooling back in 2004. I put together a custom 1/2” system and modded my old Antec tower case for a dual 120mm radiator. I was able to overclock my Athlon XP well beyond its intended specifications, and took my Radeon 9800 Pro to new limits.

A lot has changed since 2004—especially in the aircooling market. Heatsinks are bigger and more efficient than ever. One look at my recent Thermalright TRUE 120 Black review proves just how far these modern towers have come. Although certainly not as popular as aircooling, watercooling still has quite a following. It has unfortunately always been just a bit out of reach for the average enthusiast—not so much due to cost, but rather the complexity.

Thermaltake hopes to bring a higher end watercooling system to the mainstream with their ProWater 850i. They have thrown a very complete watercooling system with all of the necessities into a box, and have made it univeral enough to fit a wide variety of cases. Today we’re going to take a look at the ProWater 850i and see if it lives up to its promise. (more…)

As much as modern graphics cards have progressed over the last year or two, the onboard GDDR of many of these new cards remains relatively constant. It seems that 512MB has been deemed the “sweet spot” for anything but extreme resolutions, and horsepower in the GPU has frequently been given priority during new product development. Nvidia’s recent G92 and G94 GPUs are a perfect example of this. The G80 was a radical departure from traditional GPU design with its unified shaders and other architectural enhancements.

Not only did Nvidia raise the bar with the G80, they coupled additional GDDR3 to match with the 640MB GTS and the 768MB GTX. Although they were very powerful when they first hit the streets, the revised G92 with a more efficient GPU was able to outperform them by a fairly large margin and used only 512MB of GDDR3. AMD/ATI has been a bit more conservative with their GDDR with most top models offering 512MB for the last few years. For the last two product generations, AMD has been quick to offer newer types of GDDR, like GDDR4 with the 3870 and GDDR5 with the new 4870, as opposed to greater capacities. (more…)

It hit me the other day: Furniture sucks. Hard to clean, expensive, hard to move, and neverchanging. For example, let’s look at the Big Red Couch at ICHQ. It’s been around forever. I believe I paid something like $800 for it when we bought this house in 2004. After all the ICHQ flophouse parties, (like the IC LAN, Oktoberfest, St Patty’s day… you get the idea) and all the couch-crashers, it fell apart. The arms are worn through, the padding on the arms is gone, it has dog hair all over it, it’s just generally sort of beat up. Repairing it would be really expensive.

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I’m not sure what it is, but Thermalright’s products have always caught my eye. Generally speaking, their heatsinks are innovative, high quality, and perform well. I still recall the pair of SK-6s I bought for my dual Athlon rig several years ago, and more recently, the SI-128 SE that sits in my main rig today. The Thermalright product I’ll be reviewing today is not really new, but a slightly tweaked re-release. The TRUE Black 120 is essentially a reincarnation of the popular Ultra 120 eXtreme; what sets it apart from its predecessor is the black nickel plating and a few extras, like a second pair of fan clips and a tube of premium grade thermal paste. Since we never had the chance to review the original Ultra 120 eXtreme, I was happy to receive a TRUE Black 120 sample from Thermalright to add to the charts.

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