Content and news by Rob Williams

“Reward of water-cooling a CPU is apparent; high cooling performance with very low noise. Equally apparent is the risk involved. If something goes wrong during the installation your computer turns into a high voltage aquarium. While most computer enthusiasts feel the reward outweighs the risk, the average computer do it yourself (DIY) person does not. In an effort to push water-cooling into the mainstream by taking out the risk,
Cooler Master introduces Aquagate Mini. How does Aquagate Mini eliminate the risk aspect of water-cooling? Read on and find out.”

Check it out at A True Review.

“For less than $60, you can get a case that comes with more items included than a lot of $80 cases. The XPlode may not have all the lates features, but what it lacks in features it more than makes up for in value! From the pre-installed LED case fans to the 10” UV cold cathode to the windowed power supply with UV-reactive fluorescent wiring to the mesh windowing, A-Top’s XPlode is an attention getter from the word, “Go”!”

Check out the full review at Lan Addict.

There are even more updates from Hexus from the CTS!

Thermaltake show off their shiny bits:
“Thermaltake looked like it brought its entire product catalogue to CTS 2005. There was a mind-boggling array of fans, cases, heatsinks, passive-cooling and water-cooling bits and bobs on display.” — URL.

Zalman’s Reserator 1 Plus:
“If the original Reserator didn’t quite have the features and compatibility you wanted, then the Reserator 1 Plus might be worth a look.” — URL

Saitek, looking cool in bloo:
“The X52, designed to take account of feedback from the gamers using the X45, addresses many of the niggles from the previous stick and adds a few all-new touches.” — URL.

“If I have to say something bad about the board, it’s that the aesthetic makes me decidedly unwell. Go forth and seek, should high-performance, feature-packed, well-presented Pentium 4 be your Valhalla. Highly recommended.”

Check it out at Hexus.

“ATI Tray Tools is a small utility that can be found in the windows tray which then allows instant access to options and settings. Quite handy and quite a small download. Just click the executable and you are good to go.

To avoid some confusion, Guru3D.com recently became official English hompage and distro for this utility. You can find all further information and history on it’s updates at this webpage. What does Tray Tools do ? This tweaker for ATI Radeon cards positions itself in the system tray.”

There are a lot of changes to this tool; You should definitely check it out. It’s one of my favorite programs easy. Get it at Guru3D.

With Andrew Tridgell silent, apparently on legal advice, open source community leader Bruce Perens has stepped up to defend the work Tridgell did reverse engineering the protocols used by Bitkeeper. Bitkeeper is the closed source proprietary source code management tool that until last week, Linus Torvalds used to manage Linux kernel source code.

Torvalds has responded to the controversy by blaming Tridgell, and made two extraordinarily intemperate attacks on him online, the second accusing him of willful destruction.

Quite the heated arguement going on. Check it out at The Register.

Nearly two years after Apple’s iTunes launch, record executives have become worried that they have inadvertently ceded too much power over their industry to this charismatic computer executive.

Frustrated at what they see as Jobs’ intransigence on song pricing and other issues, some record executives are now turning their hopes toward other partners, particularly mobile phone carriers eager to get into the business of selling music. They see this new focus as a way to broaden the digital music business, and lessen Apple’s dominance over their market in the process.

Read about it at News.com.

“Remember 1,200 bits per second?
How about 2,400 bps, 9.6 kilobits per second, 14.4 kps, 33.3 kps or 56k? Remember protocols and baud rates? Remember modems?
Of course, modems aren’t quite ready for the computer hardware scrap heap.”

Great article! Check it out at Pollstar.

“Nobody could really have predicted the gaming community’s embracing of massively multiplayer online games but, as the recent record-breaking release of World of Warcraft has proven, MMOGs are here to stay. By far the most common form of MMOG at the moment is the traditional fantasy-based RPG – any deviations from that Comment (0) -->

“The NexStar 3 enclosure fits a regular 3.5″ IDE HDD and is USB2. This easily transportable unit is perfect for backups of important data. Standard 3.5″ hard drives are relatively inexpensive and USB2 is compatible with most computer systems. All-aluminum and available in four vivid colors (Steel Grey, Onyx Black, Brilliant Red and Midnight Blue), this is clearly one of the sleekest looking enclosures on the market. Watch the Video to find out more…”

You can check out the full video review at 3D Gameman.

Hexus has a LOT of CTS content this round.

Computer Trade Show – an outsider’s take, Part 1
A small team, even on crutches, could get around the show in a day – or two if determined to miss nothing – but few if any products make world debuts, even if plenty do get their first UK outings. On the plus, side, the hack with web-site inches to fill has to look harder (doubly so one with little expertise in the subtleties of general computer retailing), and that can mean keeping an eye open for things that might get passed over at a bigger show – whether useful, interesting or both. URL

Touchmate Vibrator Headset
The Vibration control has two levels of response and runs of an inline battery pack giving roughly 30 hours of gameplay. The vibration motor kicks in when low bass noises are played or heard… so rumbling explosions really rumble! URL

Bestcare Flexible Keyboard
The actual key presses feel spongy, but that’s to be expected from a keyboard with no stiff bits in it at all and a high proportion of silicone. So what’s the advantage of having one then? There’s a whole mass of professions where having a keyboard impervious to dust and liquids would be a boon… and a keyboard that can be unplugged and dunked in the sink to wash is even better. URL

Enermax Enlobal Fan
Oh, and if you’re wondering why you can see a shot of a fan running underwater, I’ll pass that over to Enermax’s Paul Chung to answer “It’s because we can, ok?”. Fair enough. URL

Greetings from the Central Wastelands! While the Auto Assault team has been busy getting everything settled for E3, preparing for our first blast of beta participants, and having a blast as we see the game itself shaping up into something we are extremely proud of and can’t wait to share with all Comment (0) -->

“Professional camera bags cost an arm, a leg and sometimes, even more! They are a necessity for photographers but not everyone can afford to pay such exorbitant prices.

Fear not, however! We have a short guide on how you can convert any ordinary backpack into a camera backpack for virtually no cost at all!”

Check out the full article at the Rojak Pot.

“Thanks to our friends at SpireCoolers.com, enter to win one of two Spire AMD64 Certified 754/940/939 KestrelKing VI CPU Coolers. Enter today – 1 post per day is allowed. The contest will end on 5/7/05 at 12am EST.”

Check out info and rules here!

“For our testing we simply did a couple backups of my compact flash cards and also connecting to the PC to navigate and move files. The CD311 did not require any drivers to use with the PC as it was seen by the computer as an external hard drive just as any other similar units we have used in the past. For backing up the compact media, it was as simple as plugging it into the media reader, powering on the CD311 and choosing to backup the entire contents. This unit does also provide the ability to browse any media and pick and choose files to backup also which is a nice little feature. Doing this might be a little time consuming but it offers some real flexibility of use.”

Check it out at 3D Xtreme.

“Nividia are very well known for their chipsets targeted at high-end graphics users but Nvidia really want to break into the mainstream where the money is and hope that this Intel nForce4 chipset will allow them to compete with Intel and their chipsets.”

Check it out at A1 Electronics.

Following the success of The Race to Find the One live event, WBIE and Monolith Productions are proud to announce our Live Events Team schedule for the next six months. Beginning next week, The Matrix Online moves forward with a new cinematic and an accompanying mission pack. Morpheus continues his quest for Comment (0) -->

Taking a closer look at the cards GPU block reveals Sapphire tribal alien again on show, I also noticed the grim reality that this was indeed a reference cooler and has no contact on the ram on the GPU side of the board.

Read about it at XtremeComputing.

The NGO Console allows you to toggle among all nVidia modified drivers around. You don’t even need to reinstall the display driver. The distance between the drivers is a simple Reboot!

Features:
• nVidia – Toggle between: Omega Drivers, Xtreme G, DNA-Force, DHzer0point, NGO, None.
• nVidia – Toggle Coolbits: Disable, Enable at SLI mode, Enable at Normal mode.
• ATI – Toggle between old and the new OpenGL drivers on the fly.
• Both – Included RefreshForce to apply 60Hz Refresh Rate fix.

Check it out at NGOHQ.

“John Guzman is back with us this weekend, and in this editorial, he’s sharing his opinions about how living in the digital world has really changed his daily life style and how this world has become so digital.”

Check out the full article at Phoronix.