Introduction

In the computer industry, cases are a rather hit and miss affair. With some monstrosities such as the forthcoming Thermaltake Ten to the elegant Lian Li cases, we have seen computer chassis come and go.

Remember the days when computer cases were a drab off-white colour and full of razor sharp edges?  In those days building a computer was considered baptism by fire!  The nearest a consumer could get to an elegant case was from Apple and these had the resemblance of ‘boiled sweets’  In today’s  world we  see many types of computer enclosures and in many interesting shapes. To add another factor into this ‘whirlpool’ of chassis configurations; we now have the consumers themselves making their own cases!

Company Background

Fractal Design was founded in Sweden in the year 2007 by a Mr Hannes Wallin! They first entered the Scandinavian Market in 2007 and two years later they had explored additional markets in Europe; namely Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK amongst others.  They also have recently signed a contract with their new distributor in Australia.  In addition, during the second Quarter of 2010 they will enter the North American market!

Their goal is to be widely recognized for a high end level of design and products.  Fractal is putting great effort into choosing the right partners in each region, and  their strategy is to work with a good structure of selected distribution partners and retail/e-tailers!

One of the core ideas of Fractal Design is to provide products with an extraordinary design level. The principles of their products have been stylish, simplistic and clean; which they prefer to call the Scandinavian design! Their ethos is to produce products that incorporate the above, but without compromising quality, functionality and pricing.

Introduction

Over the course of the past six months, there has been one brand of cooler causing a real stir among many cooling ranks. This reviewer even had Thermalright banging on ones door demanding answers as to why the Titan Fenrir is so good in the reviews they have seen. Today, we shall be taking a look at a cooler that many consider the best bang for buck on the market.  If you’re reading this and you’re a big overclocker, you know all too well the importance of choosing  the ‘right’ cooler for the job, but at the same time not costing so much that you’d might as well jump on the water-cooling bandwagon.

Titan was launched in 1992 with a focus on low cost cooling solutions for the masses.  Generally speaking, Titan hasn’t had the best track record until they struck a bit of fortune with the Fenrir.  Previously, many Titan coolers have had less than stellar performance, let alone great build quality.  Titan looks to put their uneven past behind them with an up to date Fenrir – the V2, meaning the cooler now supports LGA 1156 out of the box. Something which Titan now hopes will gain them an even bigger majority share of the Intel and AMD cooler market.

Specifications

• For AMD Socket AM2+/AM2/AM3/940/939/754/K8
• For Intel Socket 775/1156/1366
• PWM intelligent controller: automatically adjust fan to provide wonderful balance between performance and rumble generated from CPU
• 12mm Fan – 800 to 2200RPM
• Heat Pipe Direct Touch: provide the maximum heat conductivity and draw heat away immediately
• Unique fin design: reduce air resistance to enhance cooling performance

Cooler Master has been in business for more than a decade. They were “founded with the mission of providing the industry’s best thermal solutions.”  The Cooler Master CM690 II Advanced that we’ll be looking at today, which is a significant update to the venerable CM690, a budget champion for wire management with superb airflow, aims to push them further toward that mission.

Packaging and Specifications

The box arrived as it would when purchasing it from a store with no additional box or padding around the case’s own box. As you can see, it didn’t need any and survived the trip through UPS’s system quite nicely. The box is strong and the styrofoam floating the unit inside is ample to protect it in transit.

On the back of the box are some photographs and descriptions of various aspects of the case. The side lists the specifications, which are listed at Cooler Master’s site as well. The features outlined on their site are:

• Oversized front and top mesh design for superb ventilation.
• Accommodates 120 x 240 mm radiator inside the top or bottom.
• Dust-control filters for all meshed areas.
• Air cooling support for up to 10 fans (with support for up to 5 x 140mm fans).
• External SATA X-dock .
• Front blue LED fan on/off switch.
• Rear retaining holes for water cooling kit.
• Includes 1.8″ & 2.5″ HHD and SSD adapter.
• Cable management and CPU retaining hole for easy maintenance.
• Includes VGA card bracket (supports triple GPU card).

Box Front	Box Rear
Box Side	Box Opened

Out of the Box

Intel’s newest chipset offerings, the H55 and H57, promise to bring good performance at a reasonable price.  The chipsets are very similar with only a few major differences.  The most glaring difference is the lack of RAID support on the H55, while the H57 does offer it.  The other major difference is the amount of supported USB ports, the H55 supports 12, while the H57 supports 14.   Combine either of these chipsets with one of the Intel processors offering  built in graphics, and you’re well on your way to a price-conscious build.  This review will be on EVGA’s H55 offering, the 123-CD-E635-KR .

How will EVGA implement the H55 chipset while keeping with it’s reputation of building high performance and highly overclockable motherboards?  Read on as we explore this latest offering from EVGA!

Let’s begin by exploring the H55 chipset and what it has to offer.  Here is the block diagram of how the chipset integrates with the processor and other system features.

As you can see, there are many features packed in to this chipset design.  One of the more unique features is the ability to run graphics that are built into select Intel i5 and i3 processors.  If you’re wondering exactly which processors offer built in graphics, here is the current list at the time of this review.

Now that we have a feel for the H55 chipset and what it’s feature set is, lets move on to a more in depth look at this EVGA board.

We all remember the good old days; arguing who has the best cooler – you either were a TRUE or IFX-14 lover!  This reviewer however was a TRUE fan; simply down to how easy the heatsink was to fit on the board, as compared to the huge IFX-14. However; both did have with their own issues. The IFX-14’s downfall was largely due to a poor base. Today we see an eagerly awaited upgrade of the IFX-14 in the form of the ‘Arrow’, but not from Thermalright – instead, a sister company called Cogage.

About Cogage

Thermalright Inc. saw an issue with their high-end cooler – cost!  To remedy this, they created a daughter company called Cogage. Aimed at the more mainstream market, it was founded in order to make higher-end product more readily available due to its lower prices.

Specifications

The specifications from Cogage’s website:

We recall from last year a question that many pondered – just how far can air cooling go? Air cooling can only go so far and it won’t be long until we hit the limit. We’ve already seen some companies take to water cooling solutions with all-in-one kits – some more successful than others. It won’t be long until some of the bigger names start to find new ways to adapt air cooling for the masses and take it to a new level. There are already rumours of vapour chambers and TEC’s in the future. However, one such company that we are reviewing today has taken a step ahead of the big rivals and taken air cooling to a whole new level – liquid metal.

About

Many people will be unfamiliar with Danamics and wouldn’t have known they produce CPU coolers. Founded on the principle of providing manufacturers of electronic hot spots the very best in cooling, Danamics started in 2005. Since then, Danamics has worked on developing, manufacturing and commercializing their core technology, which centres around the principle of using liquid metal as a heat remover. Danamics were keen to improve on their earlier cooler; the LM10. Much hyped and talked about, it proved to be only average and couldn’t keep up with the very best standard air coolers, let alone justify such a high price tag! They redesigned the whole cooler from the ground up but have kept the same Sodium Potassium Alloy used for cooling.

Liquid Metal you say?

Sodium Potassium Alloy (aka NaK) is a top substance for heat transfer. However, reading through the nice detailed warning booklet, it is highly reactive to air and water. Something that puts many people off due to the fact that if the substance were to leak, well, watch out for an explosion! This NaK is pumped around the cooler’s nickel plated heatpipes via the electromagnetic pump which is silent and features no moving parts. This pump is a REV.2 (PowerBooster 2) over the previous LMX Pump, which Danamics has told me is smaller, cheaper and more effective. Note – this does get very hot so be careful! Moving parts are totally eliminated as the magnetic force is created within the particles of the liquid metal causing it to flow.

See the image below for the step-by-step of how this electromagnetic flow works:

Step-by-step

We’ve seen a lot of news about Intel’s 32nm CPU on the internet in the past six months…Now let us take a look at Intel’s LGA 1156 platform. This platform will launch new 32nm CPU products, including Core i5 6XX and Core i3 5XX series, named Clarkdale.

Continue reading the article here!

Introduction

The Hard disk drive is dead; long live the Solid State Drive! These are the words that many are wishing to hear these days. With the reliability of these devices, combined with a consistent read speed, lower profile, less heat, noise and the fact that they are much more efficient in terms of power usage, then the age of the ‘SSD’ has indeed begun! Memory manufacturers have already jumped on the bandwagon and have invested a great deal of resources into manufacturing the next revolution in storage technology.  Coming in many flavours such as the 32, 64, 128, 256 gigabytes and above,  one can see that the potential benefits of these drives.

Patriot Memory was established in 1985 in Fremont, California (with a name such as ‘Patriot’, this would indeed make sense) and has long since established themselves in their native USA as a force to be reckoned with. However, in the United Kingdom and perhaps the rest of Europe, they have not made quite as big of a splash as was made in the USA. This could be due to that fact of the very name of the company, or with the cynics in the United Kingdom, thinking that this is a company built from American propaganda rather from that of solid products.  However having seen some of their memory in action, nothing could be further from the truth. Patriot has ever so slowly built a fierce reputation in this country and they are slowly growing further.

Today we take a look at Patriot’s latest offering the PS-100 Solid State Drive.  Coming in at the smaller capacity of just thirty two gigabytes and only costing roughly seventy pounds which is inclusive of VAT; from www.aria.co.uk then it could be termed as a bargain. The PS-100’s nearest rival in terms of price would be the INTEL value, and the OCZ Solid-2 drives.  However the price on this drive varies greatly and has been sold for as little as a fifty eight pounds from the aforementioned site!  The question is – what exactly would the consumer get for their hard-earned money? Let us read on and find out.

Specifications

The specifications of the drive are modest in comparison to the more costly of SSD’s; however at this price-point it is still the cheapest one around, and for the money the drive offers some decent specifications.

“The Patriot PS-100 SSD is a great way to upgrade an existing desktop or notebook computer. The PS-100 drive brings faster boot and application load times, reduced power consumption and improved durability. Looking to extend the length of your notebook’s battery? The PS-100 significantly reduces power draw extending battery life and reducing heat. PS-100 drives are more durable than traditional hard drives and are ready for the rough and tumble world of every day computing. What’s more, they are silent. The Patriot PS-100 SSDs use the standard SATA interface and are available in 2.5″ form factor up to 256GB.”

(http://www.patriotmem.com/products/detailp.jsp?prodline=8&catid=21&prodgroupid=166&id=913&type=17 last accessed 29/1/2010)

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