Content and news by Rob Williams

“”Spire has always made some decent coolers and the KestrelKing VI ranks among their better ones. While it doesn’t really rank up there among the top air coolers on the market like the XP90/120’s and Zalman’s it does certainly outperform the stock AMD cooler. The Spire KestrelKing VI cooler wasn’t terribly loud, overall we do recommend this cooler as a replacement for the stock AMD64 cooler or if you are shopping for an OEM CPU.”

Check out the full review over at 3D Xtreme.

“Club3D’s example doesn’t go overboard on the bundle, however you do get a great game and the cables you’re given are sufficient to make good use of the VIVO ability of the board. The Club3D-branded DVI adaptor is a nice touch, too. That you also get the aforementioned VIVO ability on Club’s board makes it even more attractive. Presentation is tasteful and the only thing that detracts from the board is its size, due to the RIALTO bridge chip, and the lack of dual DVI ports. If you can accomodate it in your AGP system however, it comes highly recommended.”

Check out the full review, which includes many benchmarks at Hexus.

“OCZ Technology has just announced the release of the OCZ DDR2 Gold series – an affordable line of high-performance DDR2 memory for gaming enthusiasts.

The OCZ PC2-4200 Gold memory boasts 3-3-3 timings – lower latencies than standard DDR2-533 memory. Let’s take a look at it!”

You can check out the overviews over at Rojak Pot

“Today we had the opportunity to take a look at one of the most feature packed power supplies on the market today. The Ultra XConnect boasts many features such as, UV reactive cables, a modulated wiring system, perspex windows, dual fan cooling system, UV reactive fans with UV CC fan grill, 500watts of true power and many many more.”

For comparison purposes, you can check out our review of the PSU here. Check out the full review at Ozcasemods.

“Many mouse pad manufacturers have been finding ways to make their products more enticing to the enthusiast, power-user or gaming community. Once such company happens to be X-RayPad, who now has an extensive line of performance mouse pads designed to unleash the maximum overall performance of your optical mouse. While they have practically sent over their entire product line for review, today we start things off with their highly impressive Thunder 8 performance mouse pad. Sporting a clever double-sided surface, this pad was designed for maximum performance and compatibility.”

Check out the full review over at Extreme MHz.

“Since I had access to this recently purchased “thumb drive” from a client of mine, I thought I be considerate and do a quick review of it. This removable storage device is sporting USB 2.0 connectivity, a large 512 MB storage capacity, and a 5 year warranty. All this for under $40.00 USD! What’s not to like? Continue on and see if there is anything not to like…”

Great looking thumb drive that performs well. Check it out at Extension Tech.

“It’s absolutely no secret that if you want to overclock with the big boys your setup is going to have to include some sort of water cooling setup. In addition to the typical high cost though, water cooling setups have always included a degree of difficulty that has kept the mainstream DIY builder away.

Aside from the time consuming potential install time (up to two hours for many kits), there is also always the danger of what happens if you screw it up. The only thing worse than than dropping a wad of cash on a watercooling kit would be the sound and smell of a leaky pump frying your freshly overclocked gear.”

Check out the full review at Hardcore Ware.

“With all of the anticipation of Dungeon Siege II, my thought before starting to play this preview build was that it would be hard for DS2 to live up to my expectations. At first glance, this upcoming title looked almost exactly like the first with a few tweaks to the graphics engine, Comment (0) -->

GamersInfo.net: The idea of putting Lego and Star Wars together in a video game is an extremely original idea. Where did this concept come from? Jonathan Smith: Well, the world of LEGO Star Wars has existed in people’s imagination since the LEGO Company produced their first range of vehicles and playsets back Comment (0) -->

As likely expected, the launch of Throne of Destiny has been pushed back to July 18, 2005. “The main reason? As you probably know, we did some closed focus testing with several groups of players last month, in preparation for the upcoming general Player Preview. Before we put the Preview in front Comment (0) -->

“This is fun,” Karen says minutes later on the phone. She passes along the tip — LHJ.com has games now! — to her three sisters, all working moms hooked on online games. She’s genuinely excited about this. “You can read the makeup tips on that site and play Ditto at the same time. That works, huh?”

As large as MMORPG’s and games like Counter-Strike are, we are still beat out, by our moms! Read all about it here.

“Despite initial appearances, it’s not very hard to master Windows and, once you have, you’ll find it surprisingly simple to make it work the way you want it to. The key to doing this is learning the tips and tricks that advanced users take for granted. Once you have done so, you will find that you can work and play faster and more efficiently than before.”

Most of these are for people completely new to PC’s, so pass it along to anyone you know in that situation. Check it out here.

“Trend Micro apologized Monday for distributing a faulty software update that caused IT workers around the world to spend the weekend fixing their systems.

The Japan-based antivirus company has promised to compensate customers whose computers running Windows XP Service Pack 2 were disabled by the update. The company said the update was only available for 90 minutes, but IT workers are angry.”

Ouch, not good. In one company, it took down 1,500 computers! Read all about it at News.com.

“For years, the software giant has promised to deliver a secure way to shuttle around key bits of information. Once known as Palladium and more recently dubbed the Next Generation Secure Computing Base, or NGSCB, the approach was once a key part of Longhorn, the next version of Windows. Although the first piece of that is arriving in Longhorn, it’s only a thin sliver of what Microsoft has been working toward since describing its idea of “trusted Windows” a decade ago.”

It’s a very interesting article.. storing key data in hardware, rather than software. Unique approach, for sure. Read about it here.

“Opera Software claimed late last week that it had accumulated 600,000 downloads of its new Opera 8 browser, which we reported on last week. For comparison, Firefox 1.0 had more than 1,000,000 downloads in the first 24 hours after its release late last year.”

I don’t care anyway you look at it, 600K in that little time is a lot. It will be interesting to see if they hit the 1,000,000 in 4 days, then the CEO can get wet. Check out the posting over at GeekCoffee.

“As with the release candidate versions, application compatibility is a mixed bag with the shipping version of XP x64 Edition. There are some improvements, however. Microsoft has done away with the Windows Media 9 Series-related errors that previously dogged some application installs–most notably that of Adobe PhotoShop Elements 3.0–and Microsoft Office 2003 SP1 now installs without any complaints, a welcome change.”

I am sure we can expect a lot of benchmarks under the OS over the week. Read the posting at PCWorld.

As promised, Microsoft has rolled out their 64Bit Windows today.

“In a long-awaited milestone, Microsoft today is rolling out special editions of the Windows operating system that work with advanced computer processors much more capable than those in most machines today.”

Read more at Seattle PI.

“One of the biggest stories will be Microsoft support of the 64-bit processors. The technology has been around for over a year with AMD being able to build them and Intel having them sometime this year but computer manufacturers have steered away from them, as there’s been no support from software companies. That should change now.”

I am sure we will learn a lot of great stuff from this years WinHEC. Read the article at WebProNews.

“Not many tactical first person shooters out there are designed to appeal to your sense of justice as well as your trigger finger. Don’t get me wrong: SWAT 4 definitely keeps your fingers hovering tightly over the mouse buttons, but as with the series’ previous incarnation, this isn’t a blast-fest where the Comment (0) -->

“At Phoronix, we’ve always had good times reviewing Tyan motherboards due to their superb performance, stability, Linux support, and features. Today, we have another motherboard from Tyan and this time it imposes the NVIDIA nForce 4 AMD Chipset. Will Tyan continue to make us smile when we wrap up testing the Tyan Tomcat K8E (S2865)?”

Great looking board, but it’s expensive and is not great for overclockers. Read all about it at Phoronix.