The Westone UM1 in-ear-monitors are aimed at people wanting good sound quality on the move without having to spend several hundreds of dollars. With a price of $109 they are Westone's contribution to a highly competitive price segment.
Diamond has designed their HD 3850 Ruby Edition with additional cooling performance in mind. Their cooler is a custom dual-slot solution which does quite a good job at keeping the card cool. In addition to that the memory has been doubled to 512 MB of GDDR3.
Noctua recently released their new NT-H1 thermal compound. This new thermal interface material is designed to give maximum performance while being simple to use. Best of all, it is ready to use immediately and does not require a "burn-in" time like the other manufacturer's products. With a long storage life, long-term stability on the CPU, being non-conductive and being suitable for compressor cooling, this thermal compound seems to have it all.
With a price of around $300 you can expect quite some performance from the Westone UM2 Earphones. They are designed as in-ear-monitors and feature two high-end drivers aimed at people that are not willing to accept compromise.
The SteelSeries SP mouse mat is the latest hard plastic mat from SteelSeries that builds on the legacy of the S&S mouse pad. The SP features a lot of new innovations such as a macroscopic surface and a solid rubber base. In our testing we were amazed by the glide performance, accuracy and speed of this mousepad which is one of the best gaming surfaces on the market today.
The Sigma Luna has a clean look with a brushed aluminum finish. It is light-weight, yet I still found it surprisingly sturdy. The large side panel window, sleek door design, silver accents, and chrome trim highly compliment the black satin finish. Top this off with an all aluminum chassis and tool-free installation, and you get a combination that is a pleasure to work with and look at.
Zalman's new ZM1000-HP power supply has been designed with fan noise in mind. The heatpipe experts from Zalman have stuck two of these inside their PSU and added a slow running 140 mm fan on top of that. This winning combination results in one of the quietest PSUs we ever tested, especially considering it delivers up to 1000W of power via six independant 12V rails.
Cellshock is a newer brand which offers uncompromising quality. This can already be felt and seen when you take a close look at the massive heatspreaders which use real thermal paste and are secured by hex screws. The 1066 MHz kit features black spreaders, while top top of the line 1150 MHz offering utilizes red ones.
The Vizo Ninja II, lovingly called Sumo because of the large size, is intended for 15" to 17" notebooks. The two cooling fans are powered by a USB port of the portable computer. This cable also features an USB 2.0 port itself, so you will not waste one of these precious connection on your laptop.
The Logitech V470 is a slick Bluetooth mouse for notebooks, so you can enjoy your wireless freedom on the road. It utilizes two AA batteries as a power source and can be had in either blue or white. The V470 is intended for notebooks with built-in Bluetooth and also comes with a pouch for easy transportation.
GeIL broke into the market with the Golden Dragon Series in the past and have now "resurrected" the dragon in form of the Black Dragon DDR2 line. The memory features a gorgeous looking PCB with a golden dragon head with bright red LEDs as the eyes. The entry level CL4 variant looks quite promising and performs just as well.
Vizo has taken the Uranus 3.5 inch enclosure and has shrunk it to 2.5. This hard drive case takes a 2.5 inch SATA drive instead, but still keeps all the features of its larger brother, with a smaller price tag.
Today NVIDIA announced their new GeForce 8800 GTS 512 MB which is based on the G92 GPU that has already been used on the GeForce 8800 GT. To our excitement our testing revealed that this $299 card can almost beat the much more expensive GeForce 8800 GTX while generally being quieter and less power hungry.
Sapphire's new HD 3870 card is based on AMD's RV670 GPU which is made in a 55 nm process with 666 million transitors and support for DirectX 10.1 and PCI-Express 2.0. This card that is sold for around $249 is intended to be AMD's new offering for an upper midrange card - but can it beat the GeForce 8800 GT?
PowerColor's new HD3850 Xtreme is full of customization compared to the reference design. Instead of two DVI ports it has one DVI and one HDMI port which supports HD video playback with HDCP and digital audio straight off the GPU. In addition to that a custom cooler by Zerotherm ensures that the card stays cool no matter what you throw at it. Another bonus is that the memory size has been doubled to 512 MB of 1.0 ns GDDR3 memory.
AMD's new Radeon HD 3850 has been a major upgrade in both performance and efficiency. GeCube has taken the reference design and increased the clock speeds. They also doubled the available memory to 512 MB GDDR3 and use a two slot cooler on the card. But can this yield enough performance to warranty a $30 price premium? We compare it to 17 other video cards.
Thermaltake has created a new Xaser case, and this time it is a monster. The Xaser VI is a huge "super-tower" case with room for Extended ATX motherboards, seven 5.25" bay devices, seven hard drives and up to ten PCI slots. There is an incredible amount of ventilation with the mesh on the front, top and sides, and there are even some other features that make this an ideal watercooling case.
Sunbeam's Mini Plant is a wolf in sheep's clothing. The PSU comes in an ATX standard sized casing but offers up to 950W of power. With most other manufacturers this means that the PSU fan will be very loud, not with the Mini Plant. Actually the fan is the quietest we ever tested in the 900W+ segment, you can almost not hear it, even under load.
A-DATA has recently released a 16 GB SDHC storage card, which is the biggest capacity available on the market. Their card offers not only plenty of storage, it is also extremely fast. Even though it is specified as Class 6 with 6 MB/s, we saw amazing 18 MB/s read and 10 MB/s write speeds.
The Tuniq Ensemble is Sunbeam's latest high-end PSU offering. It comes in at a whooping 1200 Watts with a large number of connectors included. For all your SLI/CrossFire needs you have two PCI-E 6-pin and two PCI-E 8-pin connectors available. Sunbeam has focused on making this a stable and efficient power supply and did a great job, the efficiency rating during our testing is well above 83%.
The Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 Studio in-ear-monitors are aimed at the ordinary consumer looking for extraordinary sound performance. The Super.fi 3 Studio comes at a more resonable price tag of around $100, which is less than many other in-ear-headphones on the market today.
Thermaltake recently added the Max 4 Active Cooling Enclosure to their lineup. This portable unit works with SATA hard drives and allows them to be used with USB 2.0 ports or faster eSATA connections. To help keep the drive cool, there is an 80 mm by 15 mm blue LED fan on one side and black mesh on the front and rear.
OCZ's ATV Turbo 4 GB USB stick comes in a flashy yellow color with a rugged rubber shell. It uses Dual Channel Technology to maximize performance - in our testing 35.0 MB/s. To check if it can take the pressure we ran over it with a car and then fried it. Literally, in a frying pan.
The Origen AE S10V is a pure HPTC case. It is compact and features a VFD with an integrated IR receiver for that Vista MCE remote. You will not find custom software or unneeded features inside this case, which makes it such a perfect choice for that big, 1080p TV you have in your living room.
Logitech goes all out with their latest gaming mouse - the G9. While it may look very futuristic, the shape is perfect for right handed gamers. The G9 can be customized in almost every aspect, from weight to size and feel over to all the DPI settings and button assignments. This makes the device the perfect weapon of choice, no matter what type of gamer you are.
