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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Sumo is a bit ubiquitous in certain circles on the web nowadays. If you spend time on sites like Icrontic, you’ve probably seen the ads with the beautiful girls on the big bean bags. Perhaps you’ve wondered if they’re really that comfortable or useful. Hopefully, after this read, it’ll be a little clearer for you.

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Corsair needs no introduction to the enthusiast community. They’ve been making high-end modules since 1994 and are considered by many to be one of the best in the industry. Today I’ll be taking a close look at Corsair’s TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF kit, which is of the Dominator variety. Dominator is Corsair’s enthusiast line of memory products employing a unique cooling solution called “DHX” or “Dual Path Heat Exchange”.

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Not long after the release of the very impressive NH-U9B, Noctua has returned with a brand new design. Tower heatsinks are certainly very popular among enthusiasts. One look at our review of Noctua’s NH-U12P proves that a good implementation of the design can be incredibly potent at taming toasty CPUs. As effective as towers are, however, they are not very good all-around cooling solutions.

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Coolink is still a very new name to most people in North America, but they have recently made quite a splash with their very good prices and high quality products. I had the opportunity to test out their Silenator CPU cooler a few months ago and was very pleased to see their products offered outside of Europe. Today, the Silenator, their quiet fans and many other products can be found at large retailers like NCIX. Their newest product is a very impressive looking, dual 80mm graphics card cooling solution dubbed the ‘GFXChilla’. Coolink has no shortage of clever names for their products—ChipChilla, Silenator and now GFXChilla.

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SilverStone is a relatively new company, founded in 2003. In the relatively short timeframe that they have been in the industry, they have earned quite a reputation for their high quality products. One product area they are most well known for is their small form factor and home theater PC cases. If someone were to build a home theater PC, I have no doubt that a SilverStone HTPC case would be high on their list of things to purchase.

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Three months after Noctua released their very successful NH-U12P, they are back with a new, more compact heatsink: the NH-U9B. I was so impressed with the NH-U12P when I took a look at it last month that I jumped at the opportunity to see what a 92mm version could do. The heatsinks are very similar in design–both employ four U shaped heatpipes and the same mounting system.

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Corsair has always been a name synonymous with quality. Since their inception in 1994, Corsair has been one of the most highly regarded PC memory module designers and manufacturers. Today, Corsair has more than just memory in their product lineup. They offer PC cooling products, flash memory and even power supplies.

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Listen to this article.

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Most of the time I just the first and last page of reviews. As far as this review goes, let me say this: I like the Sony A818. A lot. Read on to discover why; I think you’ll want to know.

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Buffalo Technology is a company familiar to most. They are very popular in the SOHO NAS and networking market with popular products such as the Linkstation Pro. Buffalo may not be the first name that springs to mind when thinking about enthusiast DDR2 but with their new line of Firestix modules, that is sure to change. Today I’m going to be taking a look at the most affordable dual channel kit in the DDR2 FireStix lineup — the FSX800D2C-K2G.

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When you have console gaming systems, you have controllers. Controllers are often strangely shaped, angular, and may even come with long cords. As a child of the Nintendo generation, I have fond (??) memories of my mother yelling at me to wrap up my chunky rectangular NES controllers and put them away or she’ll throw them out (she never threw them out). My friends and I used to race to see who could wrap up the cord the fastest and then chuck the controller in the cabinet.

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