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Today we are testing the new Areca 1880ix-12 RAID controller. This is Areca’ premier SATA 3 internal RAID offering and signifies a great leap forward for a company known to cater to the enthusiast crowd. With the speed and power of SSDs reinventing mainstream storage, RAID card manufacturers have been under tremendous pressure to deliver a product that can handle …

We believe that our choice of performance benchmarks are pretty impressive and have to concede that we had a hard time getting benchmarks to run outside of cache numbers. Some tests are simply impossible to run without disk caching.  That is really the beauty of the Areca though and one thing that many are very fast to point out! “Thats …

WIN7 EXPERIENCE INDEX The Win7 Experience Index (WEI) represents Microsoft’s 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 …

Iometer 2008.08.18 (Read Transfer) For the enthusiast crowd and enterprise, I have included IOMeter which allows for configurable cache sizes.  We have set the test file to 8gb, so you are seeing the results basically without cache leverage. The first is sequential bandwidth (1898 mb/s) tested with a 64mb file and 128 queue depth. The second is the 4k random …

PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE We left the best for last as we believe that PCMark Vantage is the gold standard of benchmark evaluations.  The data simply cannot be manipulated and a result is provided based on the transfer speeds observed in eight simulated user activities. This is also a widely accepted opinion held by many reviewers and storage enthusiasts. Through …

Graphics cards have been improving at breakneck speeds over the last little while. The Radeon HD 5000 series allowed AMD and ATI to beat NVIDIA to the punch with DirectX-11 capable video cards.  NVIDIA quickly responded with the GTX 400 series which started out hot and powerful, but came back to really define the price point with the GTX460 video …

If you like body art and you are on a tight budget but you dont really like making compromises then the Tattoo Pro Midi Tower Case by Cubitek with its design, quality, many features and Maori Warrior Tattoos could be the answer to all your needs Full story at RW Labs.

Intel took the SSD realm by storm this week with the long awaited release of their first 510 series SATA 3 SSD. Although consumers were anxious for the news, reviewers had to remain tight lipped having received their pre-release sample a day or so prior and being sworn to silence until Intels release date of 29 Feb 11. . We can …

INTERNAL COMPOSITION We almost feel like there should be some type of warning with respect to the pictures below of the PCB, a warning that might assure the reader of photograph authenticity.  The simple truth is that we were left speachless on first observation of the internal SSD components. The Intel 510 Series 250GB SSD is controlled by the Marvell …

CRYSTAL DISKINFO ATTO DISK BENCHMARK V. 2,46 ATTO Disk Benchmark is the quickest and simplest method to determine transfer speeds and utilizes the same test methodology as manufacturers in arriving at performance results.  It simply measures raw seguential transfer speeds for both read and write access at various transfer sizes and produces a very easily understood result.  These results are …

HDTACH V. 3.0.4.0 WIN7 EXPERIENCE INDEX The Win7 Experience Index represents Microsofts method of rating computer systems and, more specific to our usage provides a storage evaluation which provides a rating up to 8 on the PC components and system as a whole.  Our system produce a HDD score of 7.9 out of 8 and, for the first time, we …

PCMARK VANTAGE HDD SUITE The SSD Review uses benchmark software called PCMark Vantage x64 HDD Suite to create testing scenarios that might be used in the typical user experience. There are eight tests in all and the tests performed record the speed of data movement in MB/s to which they are then given a numerical score after all of the tests …

Today we look at Zotacs take on the Hunter “ the GTX 560 Ti. Running at stock speeds (822/1000) this is Zotacs entry level GTX 560 Ti card. They have three GTX 560 Ti cards on the market, the basic version which we have for review today, as well as the factory overclocked AMP! and OC editions. Using the GF114 …

Featuring a good looking custom cooling solution, nice factory overclock, lower noise/power consumption levels than the reference board and a good headroom for even higher overclocking the Radeon HD 6850 IceQ X Turbo 1GB by HIS might just be the sub $200 graphics card you’ve been looking for. Full story at rwlabs.com.

The mouse is the one thing that most of use take for granted, not for how its used but for what can happen to you with long terms usage. For those of us that use a mouse everyday for hours on end we can be susceptible to RSI or repetitive stress injury.  Sure there are companies out there that have …