Content and news by Rob Williams

“Corsair’s TCCD v1.1 isn’t known as a great overclocker. Their touched up TCCD v1.2 features a “special” Brainpower PCB and one low price. The result? High overclocking headroom for everyone.”

Check out the full review at InsaneTek.

“Up for review today, we have the Silentmaxx 580W IC-Tech PSU straight from the land of steins and stangens. Will this German-based company prove to be a viable alternative to PC Power & Cooling and Silverstone, in terms of cost and performance?”

Looks like a good competitor to PCP&C maybe? Check out the review at Phoronix.

Back in March, we reviewed the Logisys Case-51, which received an 8/10, due to it’s great style and awesome air flow. This time around, we are taking a look at the Case-51W, which is essentially the same case, but with a window. Read the review to see if the various changes on this model made the case any better.

“ASUS hasn’t done anything really wrong with the EN6800 Ultra card, but it’s let an opportunity go begging to design the ultimate GeForce 6800 Ultra, one that would use a custom heatsink, SmartFan, and, perhaps, a cooler that takes up only a single slot. As it is, it’s a case of a reference card dropped into a regular, feature-rich ASUS card package.”

Seriously powerful card, with a decent bundle. But the box size looks a little crazy! Read the full review at Hexus.

“Next week (May 18-20), the annual gaming tradeshow known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) opens at the Los Angeles Convention Center for three days of gaming glitz and madness. The show isn’t open to the general public, but that doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the excitement. As a…..

“With computer heatsinks and coolers become fancier and fancier, one basic principal remains the same. The lower the ambient temperature in the case, the cooler everything becomes. No matter how big or powerful the fans you use to circulate air through your case are, the lowest temperature that the inside of your case can be is that of the temperature outside your case. The key to a cooler system is to be able to cool the incoming air down to temperatures lower than that of the outside ambient temperature. It is with this goal that Sytrin has released the Nextherm ICS 8200 Intelligent Midi Tower.

Check out the full review on this cool case over at A True Review.

“The Purepower TWV 500W series comes with a 120 mm Blue LED fan that is almost noiseless and a honeycomb air vent, which together provide unmatched thermal performance, that is typical of Thermaltake.”

Great looking PSU with a lot of extras. Check it out at NGOHQ.

“Thanks to our good friends over at www.xoxide.com we are giving away two Thermalright XP-90 CPU Coolers. These are the top of the line air coolers overclocking. Again, we’d like to thank the folks at www.xoxide.com for making this one possible. Be sure to check out their X-Hour every week 9-10pm EST on Sunday nights. Also, they stock some of the latest cooling, case and other assorted products on the market at some of the lowest prices!”

Win an Aerocool Turbine 550 Watt Power Supply Unit.
Fresh from our review and presentation of the 3DXtreme Editor’s Choice Award, Aerocool is providing us another Turbine 550 Watt Power Supply (value $105 USD) to give away to one lucky winner.

Find out more info about these two great contests over at 3D Xtreme.

A week after two major bugs were discovered in the browser, they have been fixed. That’s quick action! 1.0.4 was released a few days ago, but I didn’t know that it took care of these bugs.

“The first flaw allows a third party to add program extensions to a Firefox user’s software, which ordinarily must be done at the Firefox update Web site. The second flaw takes control of Firefox to remotely navigate to previous Web sites. Taken together, an unscrupulous hacker can steal personal and financial information from the user.”

Read about it here, and if you see the red arrow in the corner of your FF browser, click it to update to 1.0.4.

“TOKYO (Reuters) – Nintendo Co. (7974.OS: Quote, Profile, Research) will launch its new video game console sometime next year, missing the key 2005 holiday shopping season and putting it a step behind Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) in the battle for the next-generation game machine, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun reported on Saturday.”

At least this shows that the big N has something up their sleeves. All this talk about PS3 and Xbox360 has made a lot of people completely forget about Nintendo. Even though their current system, Gamecube, is less than outstanding, I for one am really looking forward to another system from them. You can read the full post at Reuters.

“PCI Express (PCIe) mainboards for AMD’s Athlon 64 processor have been in the stores since the fall of 2004. Until now, though, these boards were not able to really “pull away” from ones with AGP 8X. This is no wonder, given that the maximum AGP bandwidth of up to 2 GB/s is entirely adequate in most cases. Even so, with the next generation of graphics cards, manufacturers’ attention will switch to PCI Express; that is where the future lies, and even today there is little difference in price.”

This is a fantastic write-up between 10 different top boards. Before you go purchase your next A64 board, check this out here.

“Of all the active Linux distributions, one of our favorite LiveCD distributions for general usage has been Knoppix. This Debian based distribution has been around for quite a while and has proved to be a success for not only system recovery but also all sorts of other operations. Here at Phoronix we have documented our findings in screenshots for the newly released Knoppix 3.8.2. Some of the new key features in this update includes the revival of MadWifi (802.11 drivers for Atheros cards), 2.6.11 kernel update, and a new knoppix-installer.”

You can check out all of the screenshots at Phoronix.

“Most DDR2 memory at PC2-5400 speeds has a default timing of 4-4-4-12, however, this memory has a tight timing of 4-2-2-8. This results in faster memory performance. The peak voltage for this memory is 2.2 and OCZ offers their lifetime PowerSwap warranty which means considerably less downtime. This product makes your DDR2 memory choice easy! Watch the Video to find out more…”

Check out the full video review at Rojak Pot.

“A good tripod is a necessity for any serious photographer. And when it comes to tripods, the Italian firm of Manfrotto is an expert.

Today, Chai will take an in-depth look of the Manfrotto 055PROB professional tripod, which is sold in the US as the Bogen 3201BPRO. Let’s see what this professional tripod can do!”

Check out the full review over at Rojak Pot!

“Well, Everyone is making Round IDE Cables, I have many different colors lying around myself, and I’m sure most of you reading this have some sort of round Ide cable in your computer right now. Today I have another entry into the Round IDE Cable family, BUT this one is NOT you ordinary IDE cable. This cable from the Mutant Mods line is not only round, but it is UV reactive, has EL Wire inside the covering, AND it will glow in the dark after the Pc is shutdown! It really adds a new dimension to round ide cable out there today.”

Check out the full review at Think Computers.

“”With the sheer number of desktop CPU coolers on the market, it can be a bit puzzling when you’re looking for a simple yet powerful heatsink. At Phoronix today we’ll be evaluating the CoolJag JAC16EC (OAK-D).”

Head over to Phoronix for the full review!

“This dual channel memory is rated at 625MHz DDR with a timing of 3-4-4-10 and is specifically designed for DFI nForce4 motherboards. While this default speed is blistering fast it can be pushed even further. Overclockers will adore this product for its raw performance, stability and reliability. Without a doubt, this memory is the best of the best! Watch the Video to find out more…”

Head over to 3D Gameman for the full video review!

“Our most recent graphics review took a look at ATI HyperMemory and nVidia TurboCache, technologies designed to reduce the amount of onboard graphics memory to an absolute minimum in order to save costs. ATI has now taken things very much the other way with the release of this card, featuring an amazing 512MB of memory. It’s not the first one released, with 512MB versions of the GeForce 6800 Ultra currently available. However, one XFX 512MB card we found at Overclockers is going for over £587, which can’t be finding too many customers. In terms of realistically priced product then, this is a first and ATI has said that it’s gunning for around £282 for boards from its partners.”

Check out the full review at Trusted Reviews!

“While the hottest CPU on the planet is the Athlon 64 X2 dual core it is not the only new CPU from AMD. The Athlon 64 has hit another revision with the Venice core at 90nm. It adds SSE3 support, acts better with mismatched memory, and overclocking on it looks to be promising. Today we look at the Athlon 64 3500+ Venice core, and compare it against the 3800+ Venice core, and the Athlon 64 X2 4800+ dual core in performance. Then we run it through the overclocking wringer to see how far we can push it past the default 2.2GHz.”

This proves to be a great overclocking CPU, hitting 2.75GHz without extreme effort, and it keeps very decent temps! Read all about it at AMD Zone.

“Being a reviewer, it is sometimes easy to forget that not everyone can afford all those high-end cards that we get to review. Not everyone wants to spend as much on a video card as they do on the rest of the system. NVIDIA and ATI of course know that and have released a bunch of low and mid-end cards catering for every size of wallet.

Today, I am reviewing one of these cards, the Point of View 6600 GT, a mid-level card using the NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GT chipset.”

Check out the full review at Bjorn3D.