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TESTING METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS Luckily, I have two laptops to test with the U Stand. One is the 13 Dell Vostro 1400, and the other is a 17 HP Pavilion DV7-1428CA. Since both machines are not capable of gaming (especially the Vostro), I decided to run the AIDA64 stress utility benchmark, and record the temperatures from both AIDA64 and Speccy: …

FINAL WORDS AND CONCLUSION Cooler Master really hit the nail with their newest introduction into the Notepal series. The U Stand adopts much from coolers in the same family, such as the U2 and U3, while brining new improvements to the game. The U Stand offers a plethora of height options, excellent cooling performance, and a solid base of features. …

THIS DRAW HAS BEEN WON.  SEE BELOW! Have you been sitting on the fence thinking about getting an SSD?  Drooling over the thought of having one in your own system? The simple fact is that a solid state drive almost makes it seem like the computer knows what you are going to do before you do.  Its just that fast …

Its been a while in the making but The SSD Review has finally got its hands on eight (8) new generation SATA 3 SSDs in the name of Patriot Wildfire 120GB SATA 3 SSDs for RAID testing. With a host of companies offering the latest SandForce controllers on their SSDs, Patriot is setting out to leap above the pack with …

FEATURES AND SPECIFICATIONS Patented Configurable Cooling Fans Two patented 100mm silent fans are included and placed underneath the aluminum surface. These fully configurable fans can be used to pinpoint to the hottest areas of your laptop (i.e. CPU, HDD) for unsurpassed cooling performance. Ergonomic design Five different height settings showcase the ergonomically design for best viewing/typing angles which  allows you …

This is the my Test Bench and it is truly as intimidating as it appears. Many hours of dedicated planning and consideration have gone into this build and it has been used in many benchmarking excursions and extreme overclocking sessions. She has even set a few HWBot world records along the way!  Click on the photo for full resolution. SYSTEM …

ANVIL STORAGE UTILITIES Fast becoming one of our favorites, and a go-to benchmark, is the new Anvil Storage Utilities. This is a Beta version, as it is still under development. This benchmark is just too great to pass up though, and we will be using the 1.0.28 Beta6 version. A key thing here is to note the extremely high IOPS …

HDTUNE PRO 4.61 One thing that became very apparent when using the Patriots was the excellent latency that we were receiving. A PCIe raid card allows the SSD to function at its very best, eliminating much of the overhead and latency of some other connection methods. The LSI 9265-8i is a great performer and allowed for some of the best …

WIN7 EXPERIENCE INDEX The Win7 Experience Index (WEI) represents Microsofts method of rating computer systems and, more specific to our usage, provides a storage evaluation through a graduated rating system up to 7.9 on pc components and the system as a whole. This benchmark is built into Windows and anyone can use it by simply typing: Go to Win Orb/All …

PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE One thing that becomes readily apparent when we are running the synthetic benches is that they are just that; synthetic. Where the SandForce drives really excel is in the actual real world tasks, that utilize a variety of data. In PCMark Vantage the data simply cannot be manipulated, and a result is provided based on the …

CONCLUSION At the end of the day, we need to illustrate a very important point. While the LSI 9265-8i is the fastest RAID card on the planet, it simply cannot give these drives the true justice that they deserve.  The throughput of the Patriots, both in MB/s and IOPS, if they could scale perfectly in RAID would be phenomenal. 4.440 …

If you are running out of space on your home computer, or you want to easily store files on a networked device that makes sharing them easy, a NAS may be the right option for you. The thing about NAS though is that they are not as simple as they once were. The choices are many and configuring some of  …

The G1-Killer Sniper 2 is a Z68 based motherboard that has been designed specifically for hardcore gaming. In a world where gaming and enthusiast systems have been combined we find this to be a rather bold product decision. Full story at Ninjalane.

Already so impressed with what the MARS II has to offer, we knew what had to be done. Using GPU Tweak, the overclocking software that replaced ASUS SmartDoctor, it was time to see just what kind of overclocking performance could be had from the new MARS II from ASUS. I’m expecting good things from the card to be honest. For …

August people, perhaps the hottest month of the year and certainly the month of the year when most people leave their homes to go on their much awaited vacations. I too am one of those people but before I go I have in store two great contests/giveaways for you all with almost USD800/700E in prizes. The first of these two …