Aspire DarkSide ATX-AS600W-BL 600W Power Supply Review

Now I am not the big Star Wars geek like you might think, but I must say the notion that the Pink Floyd gods were smiling down on me passed through my mind and brought a smile to my face. Considering I will eventually get around to doing a Dark Side of the Moon mod, this power supply - if it is up to the task - will end up in that particular case. But I digress, let's get on with business and the reason you are here.

http://reviews.pcapex.com/power_supp...__600w_psu.php

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sapphire Pure Innovation PI-A9RX480 Motherboard Review

We've been just as fortunate in the NVIDIA vs ATI graphics card contest. It was NVIDIA who first enjoyed market share and kind of sat on their heels while ATI innovated and eventually produced a card that could trounce the best that NVIDIA had to offer. Of course, NVIDIA got off their collective ass and came out with another that could beat ATI, and so on and so on... All the while we get better technology at lower prices. NVIDIA decided to branch out into the motherboard market and because of that, we enthusiasts get to play with our nForce4 motherboards which have proven to be exceptional. The nForce4 board has made NVIDIA a lot of money so far, but in the warped time of computing, it is actually starting to get a little long in the tooth. ATI believes they see a chink in NVIDIA's armor and developed their own chipset to compete with the NVIDIA NF4; they developed the Radeon Express 200P chipset and hope to leave 4 Red finger marks on the cheek of NVIDIA.

http://reviews.pcapex.com/motherboar...otherboard.php

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Terabyte Drives Redefine External Storage

Maxtor's recent press release sounded exciting: Could 1 Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) in an external hard drive actually be true? Well, yes and no. The total capacity of the OneTouch III is indeed 1 TB, but it is achieved by assembling two 500 GB hard drives into one enclosure that is double the size of conventional external hard drive products.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/...ernal_storage/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The GeForce 7800GS Shows AGP Ain't Dead Yet

The graphics world has been on fire for the past year. Over the span of three months we have seen new top cards play tug-o-war for the flag on their side. This is a fantastic thing for the consumer as it drives prices down. However, what about those who still own an AGP motherboard? These enthusiasts have been forced to hope and pray that AIB (Add-In-Board) vendors will take these PCIe parts and cross the technological crevasse to AGP.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/...aint_dead_yet/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS motherboard

Foxconn throws in the usual assortment of goodies consumers should normally expect such as manuals, driver and application CDs, and storage related cables. There is a rear IO shield as well as a cable attachment for S-video out. Otherwise, things are fairly unremarkable here, but given the relatively low retail cost of the board, this shouldn't be much of a surprise.
As we've already mentioned, the Foxconn WinFast 6150K8MA-8EKRS is a MicroATX board. In terms of chassis options, you can use this board in almost all sizes of cases supporting ATX and MicroATX. Overall, the layout is very good, though there is one troublesome area which we will get to in a moment. There's really good space around the CPU socket, and the capacitors did not cause any problems for our Koolance water cooling kit, and for larger coolers such as the Zalman CPNS9500.

http://www.viperlair.com/reviews/cpu...MA/index.shtml

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2GB of RAM: Do We Really Need That Much?

How much RAM should be enough for comfortable work of an up-to-date platform? Most today’s systems are equipped with 512MB or 1GB of RAM. This amount of memory has been quite sufficient recently for work in most contemporary applications. However, the memory makers and retailers started pushing forward the idea that today’s systems need as much as 2GB of SDRAM. Is it really so? Some people believe it makes sense, some don’t, but it is us who will be digging out the truth. Since there appear more and more 2GB memory kits in the market, we decided to carry out our own investigation that would show us whether contemporary computer systems will really require over 1GB of system memory.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mem...y/2gb-ram.html

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Liam