Since SATA drives have become the dominant style on the market today they’ve effectively kicked the IDE style drives to the side… Now, beat down, homeless and with no PC to call home these drives are trying to find a new life, a new purpose to keep spinning, they’re looking to prove that they can be useful once more. I’m glad to say that most of those old IDE drives can have a new purpose, be useful and get a nice new home in a brand new portable enclosure. With a nice hard drive enclosure you can bring new life to your old IDE drive, and give it a new purpose in life, it can be used as a backup to store your important data, or as a secondary drive for whatever your needs, and since these enclosures are meant to be portable you can then take your data with you to share with other. I guess we could call them mobile homes for IDE hard drives…

Up on the review block today is a product from EagleTech that is meant to give new life and new meaning to those old discarded IDE hard drives since you’ve upgraded to the new SATA versions; it’s the Consus N-Series IDE to USB Enclosure and it’s exactly as it sounds, an enclosure that turns your IDE hard drive into a portable USB hard drive. The Consus N-Series Enclosure is very nice, it’s well made, and it even has thumbscrews for easy access to install your IDE hard drive.

So continue on to check out a great new home for your old IDE hard drives…

Read Full Review HERE

The P45 chipset has arrived to take the reins from the P35 chipset. MSI’s latest still uses the cheaper DDR2, allowing you to get the most from the new without the need to stop using the old.

http://www.viperlair.com/index.php/reviews/msi-p45-platinum.html

“There are a few points that the Specifications don’t cover. The first is MSI’s new DrMOS and GreenPower, aimed at increasing power efficiency and lowering power usage. The P45 Platinum has some ye olde overclocking jumpers which allow you to increase the base FSB via hardware; personally I think this will be a little used feature by most. Enough time has passed that this would seem like a new feature to many, but the old(er) folks will remember these from days gone by when New Kids On The Block were cool. Like NKOTB, they should have probably remained in the past. That said, MSI’s RapidBoost feature used in conjunction with the jumpers might better justify their inclusion.”

http://www.viperlair.com/index.php/reviews/msi-p45-platinum.html

NEW CONTENT (Miscellaneous) - Smooth Creations Asylum Gaming PC

QUOTE: “Today, we’re not just looking at one of Smooth Creations’ pimped out cases, but a complete system from them which includes everything from CPU to DVD-ROM.

The first thing we’ll be doing is looking at the outside of the case to see what’s going on with the paint job along with the particular case Smooth Creations decided to use. From there, we will take the panel off and dive inside the case to see what we’ve got as far as components go. Once that’s all done, we’ll fire the system up and see how it goes in performance land against our humble graphics card testbed.”

For more information, please visit - http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1543/smooth_creations_asylum_gaming_pc/index.html

Best Regards,

The TweakTown Team
http://www.tweaktown.com

Title: AMD Radeon HD 4870 X2 On Linux @ Phoronix
Direct Link: http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=12734
Summary: “While details on AMD’s high-end ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 graphics card began surfacing last month, today this dual-GPU graphics card has formally launched and will begin shipping to retailers. The good news this time around is that this graphics card will actually be something worth looking at under Linux now that there’s the needed CrossFire support on the horizon. We’re not yet permitted to publish the Linux CrossFire benchmarks, but today we have a few pieces of information to share about the Radeon HD 4870 X2 on Linux.”

ATI HD4870X2 vs NVIDIA GTX 280 - High-End VGA Comparison

“ATI launches their high end single VGA card today, the HD4870X2 is compared to NVIDIA top offering in this review using 8 different games to see which ones comes out on top. Read on to find out!”

http://www.madshrimps.be/gotoartik.php?articID=864

The Radeon HD 4800 series didn’t exactly overwhelm NVIDIA’s GTX 200 series with raw performance. In fact, the GeForce GTX 280 and 9800 GX2 were more powerful than the Radeon HD 4870. The Radeon HD 4800 series cards, however, were still excellent cards and they were offered at extremely competitive prices, which put significant pressure on NVIDA. At the time of their launch, the Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870 were both less expensive and more powerful than the GeForce 9800 GTX and GeForce GTX 260, respectively.  Since then, NVIDIA has reacted with a quick round of price cuts.

While enthusiasts were contemplating the purchase of a new Radeon or GeForce, AMD then planted another seed and released some concrete details regarding the Radeon HD 4870 X2, as if to say, “Yeah, we’ve got you covered at the $300 price point and a new, ultra powerful behemoth is coming real soon too. Maybe you should hold onto your upgrade money for a bit?”

That behemoth is the Radeon HD 4870 X2 and it arrives today. As its name suggests, the card features two RV770 GPUs running in tandem, for what is effectively a Radeon HD 4870 CrossFire configuration on a single PCB. Other than its pair of GPUs, however, the Radeon HD 4870 X2 has a few more differentiating factors we’re now able to tell you about. Read on for the full scoop…

ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 - AMD Back On Top:

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/ATI-Radeon-HD-4870-X2–AMD-Back-On-Top/

Title: Palit Radeon HD 4870 X2 1GB - AMD Reclaims GPU Supremacy @ Techgage

Link: http://techgage.com/article/palit_radeon_hd_4870_x2_1gb_-_amd_reclaims_gpu_supremacy/

Quote: AMD has gone too long without a real high-end graphics card to compete with the competition, but they’re done with the pity, and prove it with the HD 4870 X2, which becomes the fastest graphics card the planet has ever seen. It may cost more than the competition, but its end performance easily negates that premium.

Title:
Sapphire HD 4870 X2 2048 MB

Link:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_4870_X2

Brief:
Today AMD released their new HD 4870 X2 graphics cards. They are based on two RV770 GPUs on one PCB. With a total of 1600 shaders and 2 GB GDDR5 memory the card has excellent chances to achieve the goal “fastest graphics card in the world”.

NEW CONTENT (Visual) - Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 in Crossfire

QUOTE: “It’s hard to turn around and say that the HD 4870 X2 is one of the most anticipated cards of recent times, due to the plain fact that there have been so many cards released over the last three months. While some had thought that the new HD 4870 would become the fastest single card solution on the market, the price AMD launched the card at gave indication that the chances were going to be pretty slim.

Fast forward a few months and we’ve got a new card that sits at around the same price of the GTX 280. It’s packing two HD 4870 cores on a single PCB, the same core speed and memory speed as its single card brethren and hopefully a whole bunch of extra performance.”

For more information, please visit - http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/1541/sapphire_radeon_hd_4870_x2_in_crossfire/index.html

Best Regards,

The TweakTown Team
http://www.tweaktown.com

NEW CONTENT (CPU & Chipset) - Intel Atom vs. VIA Nano Platform Comparo

QUOTE: “While we concentrate on this sector, the focus is now moving towards the lower end of the spectrum. VIA has really cornered this market in the past when it came to ultra compact PCs; EPIA has been VIA’s biggest success and with the evolution of the VIA processors, each generation has gotten just that little bit more capable. Now Intel has seen just how popular this is, we finally have some competition in this sector.

Today we will be pitting the Atom platform against the Nano platform. Who has the best performance and energy savings? – Well, we don’t know yet, but by the end of this we will have an informative answer to that. Let’s move on and check out the platforms individually before we get into the testing phase.”

For more information, please visit - http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1540/intel_atom_vs_via_nano_platform_comparo/index.html

Best Regards,

The TweakTown Team
http://www.tweaktown.com

When you hop into a brand new GMC, you know you are getting all the power of a gas guzzling, four wheel drive behemoth that has sustained rednecks in their quest to get to their sister’s trailer for the last few decades. Oh… this isn’t that kind of GMC. Okay, I’ll start over. Sorry rednecks.

If there’s one thing nerds and geeks love to do with a new case, it’s destroy it and make something cooler out of it. But what if you had a case whose ROM drive popped up like toast? Yeah, I’d still mod it too, but wouldn’t that be cool? Introducing the GMC R-2 Toast. This thing cool looking on its own, but when you add in the little extras that GMC were generous enough to throw in, it’s actually pretty damned sweet.

Review URL ::
http://www.ocmodshop.com/ocmodshop.aspx?a=1294