Gaming Heaven Article: Black Knight 360 Case Review/ Installation Guide
As you may have heard Microsoft are bringing out a black 120GB HDD model of the Xbox 360 along with a built in HDMI port for those people who require it - it is to be called "The Elite". They are also bringing out various black accessories to match the new case. This model will be called the 'Elite' and is quite a bit more expensive than the existing 'Premium' model and is aimed at the people who download and save lots of films via the video marketplace or who want a HDMI connection. This new black 360 isn't out over here in Europe for quite some time unfortunately. What I thought would be a fun project is to see how easy it is to turn a regular Xbox 360 into a “black one” far cheaper than having to buy a whole new console. Not everyone would want or require a 120GB Hard drive (which can be bought separately anyway once it is launched although the price isn't very cheap) or the HDMI port but they do like the look of the black chassis.
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Gaming Heaven "Hardware For HardCore Gamers" Competition: 2 GB OCZ FlexXLC Edition
Driver Heaven is known for having the best competitions on any tech site (remember our 10,000 euros giveaway?!) and today it's sister site Gaming Heaven has the first in a line of competitions entitled "Hardware For HardCore Gamers". With these series of competitions we aim to give away components to build a high end, high powered gaming rig for future Vista DX10 gaming.
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Gaming Heaven Review: NBA Homecourt (PS3)
Street basketball is an entirely different beast than the ball dunking sport you might see on television. The rules are more relaxed and generally there are fewer players on the court. That doesn’t mean the matches are any less adrenaline filled though. High speed passes, long range shots and loads of swearing are present every single time, as are some of the most impressive dunks ever performed on the face of earth. NBA Street Homecourt takes the essence of that and multiplies it by ten – the end result being a basketball game like no other.
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Mobility Modder.net Public Beta April UPDATE V0.7.1.0
ATI/AMD can't support all the OEM's with Catalyst Drivers on Vista due to restrictions. However Driver Heaven has a tool to modify "reference" ATI drivers to allow the end user to install them on their laptop, therefore keeing their machine up to date with the newest drivers. Our original XP Mobility modder was downloaded over 2 million times. We have now completely recoded the tool for Windows Vista and it is in the second phase of public beta testing.
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Bluetooth Proximity Marketing - The Next Generation of Marketing
"Bluetooth technology is now the latest medium for advertising and marketing. Bluetooth proximity marketing has become all the rage overseas as the newest way to connect with potential or existing customers."
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Virtua Fighter 5 PS3 Review
TTGamer have posted their review of Virtua Fighter 5 for the PS3. While it may not be the most mainstream friendly fighting game out there, if you're serious about your counters and combos, Virtua Fighter 5 is a must to check out.
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Resistance: Fall of Man PS3 Review
TTGamer have posted their review of Resistance: Fall of Man for the PS3. Developer Insomniac Games are not known for their console FPS's, but after Fall of Man, maybe they should be!
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XTracPads Zoom
The XTracPads Zoom is incredibly thin and lightweight. In fact it is thinner than the pad's own packaging. The Zoom is meant for speed and the low height should make it quite comfortable. We take a few mice for a spin and let you know if the hard surface stays in place and does the job.
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Moneual LAB MonCaso 932 HTPC enclosure
The Moneual LAB MonCaso 932 series carries a price tag of just under $900, but features all the specifications to justify it. A 7" touchscreen LCD placed inside an incredibly solid all aluminum case, a great software and easy installation as well as the included keyboards are what you get for your money. We take a real close look at the case which costs more than most complete systems and let you know if it is worth it.
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BFG Tech GeForce 8600GTS OC Graphics Card (Factory Overclocked)
"Maybe it's the great looking box or the fact that they come with a nice little overclock, all these cards seem to have something that shines, fortunately for BFG Tech it has both the box and the overclock and so much more. We had a look at the XFX come launch day and it had a lot going for it, with a huge out of the box overclock it was destined to be king of the 8600GTS cards, unfortunately when it came to overclocking we discovered pretty quickly that the card was at its limit. With BFG Tech in hand we have a chance to see if the cheaper cards on the market are capable of still giving us the modest overclock, taking us up to the level of XFX."
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Solid State put to the test – Team 16GB 2.5-inch IDE Solid State Drive
"Several years ago companies started releasing USB pen drives which have reinvented the way stored data could be transported. USB pen drives (and other flash products, such as memory cards used in your digital camera) use NAND non-volatile flash memory, which is able to store and retain data even without power, making this type of memory very versatile. Pen drives were expensive at first release but now you can pick up a 1GB drive for just a few dollars, and flash memory prices are constantly decreasing. Not too long ago, some smart chap had the idea of replacing the aging hard disk drive bound with problems such as heat, size, weight, noise and mechanical failure with solid state technology. Instead of using a hard drive with moving parts, why not create a new type of drive, which is solid state and more reliable, using flash memory chips? It has been said that, within the next ten years, SSD (Solid State Drives) will replace the aging hard drive, and in the interim HDD / SSD hybrids are likely to increase in popularity as the storage technology of choice. Today we get our first look at SSD technology as we check out Team Group's 16GB 2.5-inch notebook solid state disk. At 16GB the drive is not a monster when it comes to total storage capacity, but as we take a look at this pre-production product it should give us a good introduction to the potential of SSD technology."
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ATI Catalyst 7.4 Performance Analysis (Windows XP)
"When we received an email from ATI/AMD the other day we were a little shocked that we would see a Catalyst set significantly earlier then we have over the past few months. The reason for this would probably be that with the R600 coming out early next month ATI did not want to release the 7.4s with the 7.5s due out only a week later. "The release notes are a bit sparse with only the single performance improvement below mentioned."
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Antec MX-1 Hard Drive Enclosure Review
With the MX-1 Antec set out to manufacturer an enclosure for the discriminating buyer. Their stated goal was to offer the performance of an internal drive in a device that was both portable and actively cooled. Not necessarily a lofty goal, but easier said than done. There are a lot of factors that go into a product like this, including cooling protection, and connectivity, so I was interested to see how Antec's MX-1 stacked up.
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The Best Extensions for Thunderbird 2.0
The recent upgrade to Thunderbird 2.0 marked a nice evolution of the client and while it did not bring a lot of major changes it did include a few much needed tweaks. Between these changes and my general requirement of using as few extensions as possible I have found that Thunderbird does not need many extensions to get it set up properly. There are a few excellent ones out there that everyone should know about.
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Corsair Voyager GT 8GB
"USB drives have become the norm, with many of us carrying them round on our necks; the floppy disc is officially dead due to the huge amounts of data that can be transferred and easily using USB. However, not all pen drives are created equal and today I have the speedy Corsair Voyager GT which boasts 8GB of storage and quick snap transfers."
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Noctua NC-U6
"After chatting with the Noctua rep at Channel Expo, we managed to get our hands on the Noctua NC-U6; a rather excessive chipset cooler. With 29 aluminium fins, and 2 dual heatpipes, this should give you a nice drop in temperature, and being passive, a drop in noise too."
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MSI 8800GTX OC Liquid
"Nvidia's 8800GTX has been dominating the high end GPU market for around 6 months now and there has been little variation in this department. However, MSI have now released an overclocked GTX with its own water cooling setup. This is the MSI OC Liquid, let's see if it can give us some nice numbers."
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HIS X1050 Video Card
"The bottom line is that this is a cheap way of getting the Vista Aero interface without the need for a more expensive mid to high graphics card that would be useless for most non-gamers. If that's all you need then the HIS X1050 will serve you well, and can even provide a quiet card for HTPC duties although you will need to buy an ATI TV Out dongle separately."
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Zotac 8500GT, 8600GT, 8600GTS Roundup
Today we will be taking a look at the release of the 8500GT, 8600GT and the 8600GTS. Zotac was nice enough to send over one of each of the cards for testing. With the DirectX 10 support and the price point of these cards it looks like Nvidia as well as Zotac have a real winner on their hands.
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Samsung CLP-300 Colour Laser Printer
The Samsung CLP-300 colour laser printer brings to the table speeds of up to 17ppm for black and 4ppm for colour, and a promised resolution of 2400 x 600 dpi effective output. All this is compacted into a package whose footprint isn't much bigger than a large inkjet printer. To achieve this diminutive size, Samsung uses some clever tricks in the design of their toner cartridges. Samsung does purport that the CLP-300 outputs "near photo quality" images, and statements like that tend to make us wonder "how near are we talking?" That being said, initial impressions of the printer (the out-of-box experience) were ok overall. You can expect us to go far more in-depth later on.
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SteelPad 5L Professional Gaming Mouse Pad Review
Other standard mouse pads may only be about 8 x 6 inches. The SteelPad 5L, by contrast, is nearly four times this size with overall dimensions of 380 x 280mm (15 x 11 inches). You could very easily cut this mousepad in half and have two very decently-sized, very usable pads. The rationale behind having such giant dimensions is that you will never need to lift your mouse off of the pad. You can span the entire width of your display with no trouble at all. Whether being so large is an advantage or disadvantage is largely (no pun intended) a matter of personal preference. Speaking for myself, desk real estate is at a premium, so there's no real reason for me to have a mousepad quite this huge.
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CoolIT RAM Fan and PCI Cooling Booster Review
"The CoolIT RAM Fan and PCI Cooling Booster arrived Technic3D. Easy Installation and nice Cooling for the Summer?. See you the following Review."
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MS-Tech LC-700 Case Review
"The MS-Tech LC-700 is the next Midi-Tower in the Technic3D Editorship. See you in the following Review which qualities the LC-700 with a small price presents."
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Project Spiderman 3 Case Mod Part 1
With the new Spiderman 3 movie coming out, we've decided to make a Spiderman case with the Venom ooze. This is part 1 of a 3 part project in which we will transform this case into something that looks entirely different. One of our favorite things to do is make superhero cases, and we haven't done a Spiderman case before. We plan to use zinc sheet metal to cut out the Spiderman spider, as well as black caulking for the Venom ooze and the chrome webbing. Since This case has a mesh front with a space before the fan in the front, we're going to put a Spiderman "3" in front of the fan with a brushed steel effect.
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Cooler Master Real Power Pro 1000W
The Real Power Pro 1000W incorporates all the features one would expect in a high end power supply: excellent performance, a beautiful finish, sleeved wires, and last but not least, quiet operation. This power supply also includes the new 8-pin PCI-Express connector as a native option rather than supplying an adapter.
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OCZ PC2-6400 SLI-Ready Dual Channel DDR2 Memory Review
"I want to take a moment and discuss the Enhanced Performance Profiles that are present on these modules. In a nutshell, if your are running an nForce SLI-based motherboard, the board will automatically detect the presence of EPP enhanced modules. These EPP modules are pre-programmed with advanced SPD (Serial Presence Detect) settings to boot at 800 MHz with timings of 4-4-4-15 1T. This is essentially a "noob" way to get the most out of your modules without having to fool with manually setting timings in the BIOS. Overclocking is slowly becoming more mainstream and this is yet another "automated" approach."
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Kingston KHX9600D2K2/1GB Memory Kit Review
"When it comes to enthusiast memory, Kingston is not the first name that usually comes to mind. Although Kingston markets themselves as the "World's independent memory leader", that title takes into account their desktop, server, PDA, and burgeoning flash memory lines. When it comes to system memory, Kingston's HyperX line offers the enthusiast market some great performance options, however the price generally makes their memory unattractive to those trying to find a balance between price and performance."
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MSI 8600 GT OC Edition
"Its main problem (and that goes for all 8600 GT and GTS cards) is the X1950 Pro, which offers a very similar package bar DX10 support. These cards certainly are not in a dominant position right now, they are merely "competitive". As it stands, I still feel MSI's card is a good buy, but the entire 8600 series would look a whole lot better at a lower price point, but that's for NVIDIA to worry about, not the AIB partners... "
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Four Hot Must Have Gadgets: Cool Mobile Technology
"A cordless phone that puts high profile encryption software to use to prevent snoops from listening in on your phone calls. This type of technology was previously available, but you had to bug a room and then stay in that room with your cordless. Now you can roam to your hearts content, and you won't have to worry about privacy."
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Modders-Inc Anniversary Giveaway
We are kicking it into high gear with an Anniversary Giveaway! During the month of April we will be giving away stuff at random and we have already given away lots great prizes. You could be the next winner!
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Spire Rocketeer VI - SLI Series SP-600W PSU Review
"Few years ago no one seemed to care about the quality of their power supplies, no matter how top notch the rest of the computer system were. This wasn't too wise because a bad PSU can take all the other parts with it in case of failure. Besides having proper protections, a decent PSU also has lower ripple voltage in the output lines, which can, for example, effect the signal quality of the sound card. All together it really is worth paying for the quality."
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Autumnwave OnAir USB HDTV Creator
We're writing to let you all know that we've just posted a new article at HotHardware in which we evaluate the features, image quality, and overall performance of Autumnwave's OnAir USB HDTV Creator. Unlike most other analog / digital TV tuners for the PC, this device is able to receive digital HD signals over a cable connection and not just over the air. Head on over to the site and check it out.
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nForce 680i SLI v/s RD600
We´ve just published a comparison review between ECS´ PN2 SLI2+ and DFI´s ICFX3200-T2R/G. Both of them are top of the line enthusiast motherboards being one designed for NVIDIA SLI and the last one for AMD/ATi CrossFire.
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Gigabyte 6-Quad N680SLI-DQ6 Review
"The overclocking potential of this board is excellent - with a 7X multiplier I was able to reach a stable 485MHz FSB, which while not as high as the 505MHz FSB I saw on an Asus P5B-E Deluxe is still an excellent result Don't get me wrong though, I did manage to get to a stable 485MHz - but I had to jump through proverbial hoops to get there, including having two 12cm 63CFM fans blow on the passive chipset heat pipes."
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OCZ HydroJet CPU Cooler
"OCZ is going to launch a new self-contained liquid cooler for CPUs, called HydroJet. Physically it appears to be a big conventional CPU cooler, but on the inside it is a complete sealed water-cooling system in just one piece. The main advantage is that you will have the performance of a water-cooling system but without going thru the hassle of assembling a complicated system or having tubes carrying liquids inside your PC. We had the opportunity to take a look on the prototype for this product, so let?s take a look on what the forthcoming HydroJet CPU cooler looks like."
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DDR3 Memory Modules from Super Talent
"We took a walk on Silicon Valley today and we could see what?s new?at Super Talent. They showed us two working DDR3 memory modules (not just dummy samples) with 512 MB each. Let?s take a look on what they got."
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Axiom M3ti Bookshelf Speaker Review
An award-winning, highly-rated line of speakers...and they're made in Canada? What? This just sounded too good to be true, so we had to see for ourselves! How do Axiom's middle-of-the-line, incredibly affordable, bookshelf speakers sound? Read on to find out!
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Samsung SCH-u740
"The Samsung SCH-u740 offers a unique dual-hinge design that lets you use the phone in both portrait and landscape mode - perfect for messaging."
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HP tx1000 Tablet PC
"The design of the HP tx1000 is meant to fuse together sleek styling and ease-of-use features, along with a tablet-enabled screen and enough horsepower to run multiple applications under Windows Vista Home Premium edition - definitely no small task. For an entertainment notebook that will be used for so many different types of activities - taking handwritten notes, watching DVDs, listening to music, web conferencing with both audio and video, playing games, and all other general productivity tasks - the physical characteristics of the notebook become extremely important. Fortunately, the tx1000 product designers did a thorough job envisioning all of these types of activities when planning the physical layout of the notebook. "
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Pioneer VSX-84TXSi
"We test Pioneer's flagship receiver, the VSX-84TXSi to see if this is a beast to be reckoned with. Is Pioneer's best, worth looking at?"
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CFI 4-Bay eSATA Port Multiplier RAID Enclosure Review
"I think everyone who has anything more important than the latest round of email jokes on your system should have some sort of Raid setup, or at the very least external backups. And I see no reason not to check out the CFI B4043 to see if it fits your needs."
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SAPPHIRE Pure Innovation HDMI PI-AM2RS690MHD Motherboard Review
"This motherboard is not intended to be a serious overclocker, but instead to be an asset to the digital home environment. What I mean by that is it's better suited as a possible HTPC or as a medium to get digital content to a device with a HDMI connection."
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8-Core Intel Xeon 'V8" Sneak Peek - Dual Quads
Back in January at this year's CES show, Intel was giving the press glimpses of a rig in their booth dubbed the V8. It is essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores - hence the "V8". The enterprise platform that this box was built around is based on Intel's 5000X chipset, aka Blackford, and it supports up to 32GB of FBDIMM serial memory. HotHardware has a component build-up of a more current Intel V8 machine here, with preliminary benchmarks, pictures and more details on this 8-core dual Xeon powerhouse.
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NVIDIA nForce 650i Ultra Chipset Launched
NVIDIA has taken the wraps off a new mainstream motherboard chipset offering , dubbed the nForce 650i Ultra. Designed for Intel platforms, this chipset is in direct competition with Intel's 965 and offers no SLI capabilities. Regardless, typical NVIDIA flare and top-notch performance is evident throughout.
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Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500GB USB External Hard Drive Review
"I have always been a fan of external hard drives. Especially a few years ago when Windows XP first came out, because one day you would turn your computer on and Windows would crash and you ended up having to reformat. So having all of my files on an external drive was very important. Fast forward to today and there really is not that problem, but external drives are more popular than ever. The main reason is because the availability of media has grown. You can now download movies, TV shows, and music very easily and legally! So you need someplace to store all of the media and what better place to do that than an external hard drive. Today we will be taking a look at the Western Digital My Book Essential Edition 500GB USB External Hard Drive"
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