computer-reviews.net

Samsung 940BF 19 Inch LCD Display

Friday, April 14th, 2006 | Monitors, News | No Comments

XYZ computing takes a look at the Samsung 940BF. With very little exciting happening in the world of monitors, this promises to be a fairly average computer monitor.

It’s a plain design, with a slim outer edge so that putting two monitors together will still look alright. There are no little speakers as there is no space left for them. But good riddance to little gimmicks, in my opinion.

It’s designed with office use in mind and is simplistic. Its ordinary coloring gives it a look that can blend with a clean desktop and match the other parts of the computer.

The performance is fine with a few nitpicks about how well it handles gray colors and some color issues towards the edge of the screen. But overall, its a good monitor, and it despite its run of the mill looks should be okay for those not looking for too much.

LINK

Three System Cases from ASUS

Thursday, April 13th, 2006 | Computer Cases, News | No Comments

X-bit labs takes a look at 3 different mid-range cases from Asus. Although Asus are not well-known for their cases they do offer decent looks, but plain. Their Vento system was a bit of a failure, having good looks, but bad functionality. Their focus now is just for those who want a middle of the range case, without too much cost involved.

The funniest one of the lot is the TA-370 which has cool looking, chess board like cover, which although may not appeal to everyone’s tastes has a unique styling to it. All of the buttons blend with the checked look of the cover, so they are almost completely covered up. The other parts have covers that slip down for use. There is a doorknob on the side panel that allows you to open it. Inside parts almost all have clips for easy undoing of parts.

The TA-252 has a more plain design, and the whole cover is white. There are large areas of mesh for good airflow. Another thing I like is that you don’t need to open a cover to get to the USB and audio ports. There is no tool-free design here and the little clips apparent in the above mentioned case are not there. The internals are plain.

The TA-212 shares the same internals, but a different front cover with the TA-252. It’s a completely gray, almost silver looking front cover where all the drives have flaps that come down to conceal them. They are  functional.

They find the TA-252 the best one in its class, which I would agree with, as its the most traditional, has things placed in the right places and provides enough cooling through big vents.

See the full review at X-bit labs.

LINK

Who Designed This Crap? The Great Ipod Scam

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 | News, Speakers and Sound Cards | No Comments

Not everyone likes the Ipod, but in an article at Tomshardware the author outlines the reasons why he doesn’t really support the Ipod thing.

Amongst the complaints are that it gets really scratched up really easily. Although they are not expected to last forever, they don’t even last for a few days really. They may be usable, but are not as cool as when you first got it. There is also little support for third party casings for them.

Issues with the Digital Rights of the media come into play too. It is certainly not the easiest and definitely not the best when it comes to ease of use as it places a lot of restrictions on use.

The cuteness of the name with a lower case “i” is also made fun of.

One of the other complaints it that unlike many other consumer products like printers, where the real profit is in the inks and the printers themselves are really cheap, Ipods are still quite expensive in comparisson.

Discussions are fast and furious at the site. Looks like he’s not the only one with an opinion on the matter.

LINK

Logitech Wireless Music System

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006 | News, Speakers and Sound Cards | No Comments

The Logitech Wireless Music system allows you to listen to the music from your computer on any stereo in the house.

A transmitter sends the signal from the computer to a receiver that is plugged into your stereo via audio cables. The whole idea is pretty cool for those who have a ton of songs on their computer, but do not want to be at their computer or at least want some easier way to listen to the music in another location.

According to the report at techgage it works fine, but still has a few bugs to be sorted out. The one major feature that doesn’t work is the remote control. If you are listening in another room, it’s the equivalent of listening to the radio, as the remote does not work, unless you are in the same room, which kind of defeats the point anyway.

Installation seemed alright, although not completely intuitive.

In its current setup it reminds me of car products that allow a non CD shuttle supporting system to get sound via its inputs from a CD shuttle that sends the music over radio waves.

If this could be made to work well, for example, getting the remote to work, or as the ultimate feature, to have a screen so you know what track you are listening to, it would be the ultimate solution for home audio.

Check out the full review at Techgage.

LINK

ABIT AN8-32X nForce4 SLI x16 Motherboard

Monday, April 10th, 2006 | Motherboards, News | No Comments

The Abit AN8-32X nForce4 SLI motherboard is reviewed at PCstats. Crossfire is not a great as it could be, so boards with the nForce4 SLI chipset are about the only choice for enthusiasts.

Abit is well known in the industry and builds respectible motherboards. A recent merger helped out the company amidst financial difficulties.

The board itself has a socket 939 connection to support all of AMDs chips. It also comes with a 7.1 audio built in, which is a decent extra. 4 Gigs of memory, gigabit LAN and SATA2 are amongst the other things in the package.

It’s priced fairly well for a board that has quite a lot on offer.

Overclocking ability was determined to be 280MHz, which is not bad, but not as good as some other models on the market.

Overall it manages to impress in the benchmarks. Again, it does not perform to an exceptionally high standard but is in the top half of the pack.

Head on over to PCstats to check it out.

LINK

AMD Athlon64 FX-60 Dual Core Processor

Friday, April 7th, 2006 | CPU Processors, News | No Comments

Dual core processors have already made their way into the high end wordstation and server market in a big way, but have been slower to crack into the consumer market and are often relegated to those looking to upgrade to very fancy machinery.

One of the factors that comes into play is that much of the software available just doesn’t take advantage of this technology, whereas high performance systems have had it for a little while now.

With the release of 64-bit windows and now video card manufacturers making their cards capable of utilising multi-core processors and hopefully soon, gaming software to support it dual-core processors are coming into their own, slowly, but surely.

AMD and Intel take quite different routes to doing the dual-core processor thing, which can be read about in the article at pcstats. Both are bitter rivals, plugging away at their own technology to get as much as they can from their processors.

AMD has introduced Cool ‘n’ Quiet technology which effectively clocks a processor down when it is not being used heavily, so its clock speeds are lower. When the computer starts using more resources the clock speeds and voltages are returned closer to their normal levels, until they reach normal levels somewhere near 100% system demand.

The processor beats out the Pentium D 840 in all of the system tests that are performed and does so using less power, which is of great concern to those running hundreds of computers in a corporate environment, but probably less to most home users.

64 bit operating system and software also made a big difference, allowing even faster speeds with this new technology.

Check out the full article for all the details.

LINK

Tight timings vs High frequencies

Thursday, April 6th, 2006 | News, RAM Memory | No Comments

Tomshardware does a breakdown comparing the difference between memory set with tight timings and memory set at high frequencies.

These two particular aspects of memory have been thrown around in overclocking circles quite a lot. Many enthusiasts spend a lot of money trying to get memory that can perform at the the tightest settings, allowing them to squeeze that little extra performance from their computer.

The other side of the coin is to just make the memory clock as high as possible. Just getting memory to go as fast as you can to get the same effects as the tight timings.

In their very in-depth, if not slightly confusing article they compare the differenc when overclocking in these two different ways.

The best part of the article is the conclusion where they advise to basically just get enough memory, which they recommend as 2GB (2 sticks of 1GB in dual channel setup). For better game performance just get a better video card and if not a gamer, invest in CPU and hard drive.

Take a look at this very comprehensive article for yourself.

LINK

ATI Crossfire X1600PRO/X1800XT/X1900XTX Video Cards Review

Thursday, April 6th, 2006 | News, Video Cards | No Comments

From: motherboards.org

X1900 Crossfire is currently the fastest, most feature-rich, highest image quality solution I’ve ever tested. The performance of two X1900s is simply mind-blowing when a game works with it properly. NVIDIA has a solution with four GPUs, Quad-SLI but this isn’t on the market in any numbers as of yet and will cost the buyer 2x or more a Crossfire setup. X1800 Crossfire is shown here simply to give a sense of performance if you buy a second X1800 card. X1600 Crossfire is an interesting choice in that the cards can work without a Crossfire cable.

LINK

Patriot PC2-8000 DDR2 memory

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006 | News, RAM Memory | No Comments

Enthusiast memory only really comes in two different forms. First is very fast memory with relaxed timings, but hitting much higher speeds. The second is those that cannot reach as high speeds, but have super-low latency.

This patriot memory has 3 standard timings as reported in pcstats: first is latency 3 at DDR2-667, latency 4 at DDR2-800 and finally DDR2-1000 handling a latency of 5.

This is good news for anyone who has already switched over to using DDR2, either because of using an Intel machine or because of wanting to use a new socket AM2 Athlon64 processor.

They come with the obligatory heat spreaders that come with high performance memory. They help to spread the heat when you start to increase voltages to get the most speed out of memory modules. At lower speeds, it makes no difference really.

The main concern in their test is to see just how far the memory can be overclocked. With only a slight increase in voltage it clocked up to 940MHz with lower memory timings, which is quite decent for memory, but only overclocked a little over 1GHz with the relaxed CAS 5 latency.

The memory plays well between high speeds and tighter timings. With its ability to operate with tighter timings it outdoes some of its competition that clock higher but operate at looser timings. This memory really can do anything and will provide for any user.

In gaming it offers a clear advantage over other high-speed memory, both in lower latency setups and higher clocked setups.

LINK

MSI GeForce 7900 GT 256MB Video Card

Tuesday, April 4th, 2006 | News, Video Cards | No Comments

There has been quite a shortage of 7900GT cards since they were released a little while ago. Hitting the right spot between ultimate performance and ultimate pricing, the GT has proven be a favorite amongst enthusiasts and others.

In a review at hardwarezone.com the card comes out well against its competition. It is an Nvidia reference card, which means that it is really a standard Nvidia 7900GT card with MSI’s decals on the front.

The cards main claim to fame it simply that it is good value for money, perhaps the best value for money from a high-end graphics card. It performs better than its 7800 predecessor and produces less heat due to 90nm technology and memory that is far from being pushed hard.

It was pitted against an MSI of the same range, two 7800GTX cards and an X1800 from ATI. They did not quite make it to the same level as the X1800 in 3DMark05 comparissons, but did manage to keep close when using it overclocking tool at 10% overclock.

It’s overclocking utility called D.O.T. lets you overclock the card in increments up to 10%, and you are covered under warranty even if you do use this overclocking feature, but not your own customised overclock.

An interesting point to note is that the biggest difference between cards came into play when playing games at high resolutions with all features turned on. In these tests the X1800 from ATI clearly pushed ahead of the pack, showing how much they have caught up to Nvidia.

LINK