Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Zalman HD160XT Plus Premium HTPC Case Review
Reported by: M. Page      At: 9:00 AM	Source: tweaknews
"I loved Zalman's HD160XT when I got a chance to look at it in early 2007. It was hard for me to imagine that they could improve on it very much. Well, they found a way. Actually a couple of ways. I like the reorganized front panel for the improved access to the control buttons and I/O features. I also think that the change to the iMON software is an improvement, not only for its functionality, but also for the future support and updates that will be available from SoundGraph. Losing fan control and temperature monitoring is a bit of a disappointment, but the fans in the HD160XT Plus are very quiet (at 5V) anyway, and looking back, I don't think I used the temp monitor that much either."
Monday, September 15, 2008
iStarUSA xAge-N99-US USB 2.0 Hard Drive Docking Station
Reported by: M. Page      At: 9:03 AM	Source: legitreviews
"Overall, I think the iStarUSA HDD dock is a great device to recover the use of dormant drives or to expand your storage options. With backups being so important, this gives you one less excuse for getting them done. Found online for less than $30, this is also a relatively inexpensive solution to your storage needs. Aside from a short power cable, I found no other flaws with the docking station and was easily able to add a variety of drives without compatibility issues and even hooked it to my Apple MacBook Pro for a quick compatibility check..."
Seagate Cheetah X15K.6 Hard Drive
Reported by: M. Page      At: 9:02 AM	Source: hothardware
Traditional hard disk storage is living on borrowed time. We know it and storage manufacturers know it. Solid state drives, which use non-volatile memory chips instead of rotating metal discs for storing data, are simply a better medium in the long run. They consume less power, create nearly zero heat, and produce no noise – but best of all, there are no moving parts to wear out over time. The technology and prices aren’t quite there yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Take a quick look through any tech-oriented forum and you will likely run into folks proclaiming the death of traditional platter based storage. For the most part, they're right - but there is a twist to the story as platter based storage manufacturers are fighting back. There is still plenty of life in traditional storage technologies, and Seagate is out to prove that with their newly launched Cheetah X15K.6 hard drives which feature 170 MB/s+ read / write speeds. Head on over to the site and check them out...
ATI RV770 architecture analysis
Reported by: M. Page      At: 9:01 AM	Source: bit-tech
One of the biggest improvements has to be anti-aliasing performance – it’s nothing short of incredible and it takes AMD (or ATI of old) back to where it used to be. The Radeons always used to make more efficient use of AA than Nvidia’s equivalent products and with the Radeon HD 4800 series, that has made a comeback in style. Obviously there was a fairly low barrier for entry when it came to improving the situation, but AMD has gone well beyond improving it – the architects have gone from zero to hero almost as quickly as you can say just that. Improving the render backend throughput in certain scenarios was a clever way to improve anti-aliasing performance and I’m sure that GDDR5 has had an influence as well.