DriverHeaven today looks at a Radeon 9500 Pro card from Sapphire Technology. I have to admit that this card is a real winner for what it can do at its current price. Cheaper then GeForce4 Ti4600 or Ti4800SE, it comes close performace wise to these cards and should not be ignored just because it's not made by Nvidia. Anyway, here's a short quote from the review:

"The 9500 Pro was originally dubbed a killer for a rival product namely the 'Ti4200' but in nearly all tests carried out by myself and by other reviewers and of course the public, this card can be seen giving the 'Ti4600' a run for its money. In terms of increasing the performance of your PC adding this card to your system can be assured to be the right move, I was astounded by how much better games played on my system, just by adding the card, When asking 'What should I upgrade?' I would be inclined to say more RAM or more processing power, but after witnessing the transformation to the system from this card, I now have to say I would recommend looking to the graphics if you want that burst of energy in your system."

Check out the whole review over @ DriverHeaven.net.

1030 fUnc Pad Mousing Surface: Mousing surfaces are probably the most under looked type of product when it comes to computing these days. Many companies have made a handsome living out of producing high quality mouse surfaces for computer users with the gamer in mind. One such company who has made a living out of this production is fUnc Industries with their Surface 1030 fUnc Pad which TweakTown's Shawn "Toxic" Baker takes a quick look at today!

StorageReview has taken Maxtor's latest offering for a spin in their testing grounds. Here is a snip: Succeeding the DiamondMax D740X, the DM+9 is Maxtor's entry into the high-performance desktop drive arena. Currently, the drive comes in the traditional parallel ATA format with an ATA-133 interface. Maxtor eventually plans to offer Serial ATA versions of the drive. SR has received varying reports from readers regarding Maxtor's current warranty policy. According to the manufacturer itself, however, all DM+9s are backed by a one-year warranty. Maxtor is rolling out a separate line, the Maxline Plus, that incorporates similar mechanics but is backed by a longer three-year policy.

Doobey dooo sends word that VR-Zone has just posted their review of Sapphiretech's Radeon 9700 Pro Ultimate Edition graphics card! Here's a snip.

With the "Ultimate Edition" series of graphics cards, Sapphire is looking to capitalize on the hardcore enthusiast market they missed out on with their first release of the 9700 Pro, as that release was essentially a clone of the ATI version, without ramsinks and using the standard red PCB we've all come too accustomed to. This time around however, Sapphire spiced things up by including a gaming bundle, ramsinks, and a very unique heatsink that actually has no moving parts, which will be looked into more thoroughly later on in the review.

To my rescue starting several years ago comes thermal label printers; now available in all shapes, label sizes, power usage (battery and wall socket), input style (built-in or computer keyboard interface) and price ranges. One such model is the DYMO LabelMANAGER PC shown to the left. It is a simple, elegant design able to use several sizes (1/4, 3/8, 1/2, 3/4 and 1") of label cassettes in a varity of color combinations.The difference between this type of thermal labelmaker and the one that most users are familiar with is that this uses a thermal plastic tape in a cassette holder instead of a roll of thermal paper.

The Colorcases Mars-X Case Review @ Gamingin3d.com.

Good grief! Under $30?! How good can such a cheap case be? Well, forget the idea of a included powersupply, for one thing. With replacement windowed panels easily costing that much, I went into this review not expecting much. Was I still disappointed, or was I in for a pleasant surprise? Get psyched...

Today Ethek.com have a Plus! Digital Media Edition review, in Spanish. They use an ATI 9000 All-in-wonder graphics card, and creatives Audigy 2 and Inspire 6.1 6700 speakers, extensive and very good review! Check it in this OS expert site.

English ...... Spanish

Crow @DarkCrow.co.kr sends word that their Nvidia Quadro FX 2000 and FX 1000 review is up. They used cards from Leadtek and ELSA lucky sods and for good measures they threw in ATI's FireGL X1 256MB for a comparison.

Testing was done using the following benchmarks: SPECVieperf7.0, 3DS Max r5, Maya 4.5 , 3DMark03, 3DMark2001SE , Quake3 Arena.

OCIA checks out the PC Toys Mouse MAXX Yellow Flame Mouse Pad in their latest review. Here's a byte.

Many people would be satisfied with a simple optical mouse upgrade; but why stop there? Look at the surface in which your mouse comes in contact with. Odds are it is a cheap $2 cloth mouse pad or something similar. I mean, that's almost like purchasing a $2,000 sound system for your ride but neglecting to get yourself some good speakers. Or perhaps it's like purchasing a new 2003 Escalade and getting the 14" rim option. You just don't do it! The same applies for your mouse setup. If you are going to upgrade to an optical mouse, you might as well go all out and get a high quality mouse pad.

Gigabyte SINXP1394 Motherboard: When SiS first began jumping into the Pentium 4 chipset race, some folks turned their heads the other way. But they have made a huge impact in this market niche and continue to do so today. Join TweakTown's Cameron "Sov" Johnson as he takes a look at the Gigabyte SINXP1394 Motherboard based on the new SiS655 chipset. With such buzz words as Dual Channel DDR support and onboard Firewire, things are looking to get interesting!

Julio @ TechSpot.com sends word that their PURE Digital SonicXplosion DVD review is up!

The SonicXplosion DVD touts itself as being the ?world?s first complete home cinema sound card?, a fairly bold claim. On a basic level the SonicXplosion DVD is a repackaged TerraTec SiXPack 5.1 bundled with WinDVD 4. This is by no means a bad thing as the SonicFury was a repackaged Santa Cruz ? highly regarded by many.

Just got word from Doobey Dooo @ VR-Zone that their the review of the FIC AU11 has been poated, the nForce 2 solution from FIC! Here's a snip.

We were not able to unlock the multiplier of the CPU with the AU11's BIOS, however we did manage to crank up the front side bus up to 187mhz and achieved an overclock of 274mhz, giving us a total clock speed of 2349mhz. The board would load windows all the way up to 190mhz, but at 187mhz the AU11 ran flawlessly and therefore we decided to benchmark at the sweet spot of 187mhz

We've been seeing the Radeon 9700 Pro boards for a while, but when someone comes up saying they have one called "Ultimate Edition", it makes you ask why. TweakTown's Mike "Darthtanion" Wright takes a look at the Sapphire Radeon 9700 Atlantis Pro "Ultimate Edition" and find out for yourself if it lives up to the name. Looking at upgrade paths in this review let's see if this graphics board has what it takes to earn your hard-earned dollars!

PC mag.com have posted their review of Roxio's Easy CD & DVD Creator 6! Here's a snip.

The CD-burning module is better than ever, and though none of the new applications match up to the standalone category leaders, the whole exceeds the sum of the parts. During setup, you choose which components to install, and Roxio customizes the familiar Project Selector, now called Home, accordingly. At the top is Disc Copier, improved to incorporate raw-mode capture, useful for copying games and mixed audio/data CDs. We copied Quake III Arena (known for several copy-protection schemes), which burned perfectly.

Rainer send me words that he has published an article about the Deltatronic Fanless Heatpipe Kit .

Here's a snip:...Straight after switching on the powersupply made very loud high frequeny noises. In addition to that, the IBM HD (7200rpm) also created loud noises. Deltatronic offered me an exchange of the PSU. The CPU temperature (P4 3,06Ghz) went up to 77°C within 2 mins! ... Read the complete article over here.

The guy's @ lik-sang.com have posted the first review of Nintendo's Gameboy Advance SP! Looks very cool.

The first surprise is the size of the box. I have to admit our first thought was: 'Damn supplier, they delivered the power supply for GBA SP instead of the console itself!'. When you open the box you realize the compact design of the new GBA is not just press talk, it's really much smaller and comfortable than the first Gameboy Advance. And it looks stylish :)

Of course, after a couple of minutes, the design does not really interest you anymore, so you need to play a game on the unit, see what the fuss is about the front light, see how long the Li-ion battery can last and how does the unit fit in your hands.

ABIT to the MAX - IT7 Max2 Rev 2.0: ABIT have had a very strong tradition of producing high quality motherboards with features right in the line of what enthusiasts want. Today TweakTown's Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at their latest Intel based solution, the IT7 Max2 Rev 2.0 based on the i845PE with Hyper-Threading support for the Intel Pentium 4 platform. With future-proofing features for upcoming processors, does it have what it takes to be your next board? Read on and find out!

The Overclocker Café has just posted up a small round up of five of the more popular KT400 based mainboards. These are the ABIT KD7-G, the AOpen AK77-8X Max, the ASUS A7V8X, the EPoX 8K9A, and the Tyan Trinity S2495. A much more diverse field when you begin to look at the whole package than you might expect. Here is a snip. One point I do want to make that actually was an afterthought, that was extremely surprising, was the gameport issue. If you go and drop $100 plus on a board with onboard audio you would think a gameport would be somewhere wouldn't you? Not so. Out of the five boards, each had onboard sound but only two had gameports. These were the EPoX and the ASUS boards. Click on Read More... for a link to read the review and see a screenshot.

Just got word that Gary "GlitterKill" Mullins @ Pimprig.com has posted his Geil 1GB PC3200 Dual DDR Kit review! Here's a snip.

Geil thought it would be nice if someone offered a high performance matched pair of RAM specifically for those Dual Channel DDR boards out there. Not a bad idea... this way you know you have a set of RAM sticks that are identical. Geil went a step further and made them a FAST matched pair. The kit I will be looking at is their PC3200 Dual Channel DDR Kit. The stats this RAM puts up makes it attractive even if it was a single stick. This kit has two 512MB PC3200 RAM sticks for a total of 1GB RAM. Timings are CAS 2 6-3-3 1T Running @ DDR400Mhz... Niiiiiice.

OCIA has posted their Socket 478 heatsink shootout. Here's a snip:

What happens when you lock some of the more reputable names in P4 heatsinks in a room? Well it's much like a pack of wild animals. You have a few content with their place in the middle ranks, you have 1 or 2 that just flat out get their butt whooped, and you have a couple competing for the role of Alpha Male (no pun intended I swear, well ok, pun intended ).