VR-Zone Hardware has just reviewed the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB S-ATA hard disk drive.

Now when looking at the back of the card we can see the features that set this drive apart from any other ATA drive currently on the market. You can see the Serial ATA power connector (larger) and the Serial ATA data connector (smaller) to the left of the drive, then moving right you of course have the drive's jumpers, and then at the far right we have the 4 pin Molex power connector that plugs easily into your power supply.

Today we had the special opportunity to review the latest DigitalWay MP3 player - the FL100 256MB. The unit featuring an award winning design sports, multiple features such as MP3 / WMA playback, an FM radio receiver, Voice and FM recording functionality, a cool indigo blue LCD display, 5 band equalizer, an additional memory expansion slot and more. Feather weighted at unbelievable 41.5gr this little fellow is the latest contestant in our high tech review lineup. Check it out by clicking on the picture in the upper left!

The Moving Picture Expert Group has defined MPEG-4 as the default standard for current generation video compression. The older MPEG-2 format is still the most widely used standard due to it being an integral part of the DVD specification. Hardware players with MPEG-4 support are just starting to appear within the consumer marketplace, but this advanced standard has already enjoyed great success within the online community since a wide variety of software codecs and players are now available. All MPEG-4 codecs share a common specification, but the underlying code base can differ greatly among the different implementations. Accordingly, TechIMO is offering a comparison of several popular formats. Click on Read More... to see which codec's they used and a link to read the review

VR-Zone Hardware have posted their Soltek SL-75FRN-R nForce2 motherboard review! Here's a snip.

The Soltek SL-75FRN-R is not able to unlock the CPU through its BIOS therefore we had to do a pure front side bus overclock, and were able to achieve a maximum clock frequency of 2470mhz using a front side bus of 190mhz. We set the memory to run in sync with our bus speed and therefore we were running our DDR400 OCZ memory modules at 380mhz at 2-2-2-6. We used a Vcore of 1.8v to achieve 190mhz front side bus with the Soltek nForce 2 board, which left us a little disappointed because our last nForce 2 board, the ABIT NF7-S revision 1.2 was able to overclock like a champ and push 213mhz front side bus. Lets take a look at the performance gains when overclocking with the Soltek SL-75FRN-R.

This just in from Dave Baumann at Beyond3D ... Since ATI started transitioning from a chip and board business to chip only business we've seen many new board vendor names pop up selling ATI based products. Another new one to the list is Fairway and we've have a review of their Radeon 9000 Pro.

Fairway is currently embarking on a retail drive -- after being so long in the "background", they now feel that the time has come for them to enter the more lucrative retail market. In addition to what is being reviewed here - the Radeon 9000 Pro 64MB - Fairway covers the entire range of ATI's Radeon product-line, including the latest R350-based Radeon 9800 Pro.

Digit-life.com have posted their HIS Excalibur Radeon 9500 128MB graphics card review. Here's a snip.

The RADEON 9500 64MB and 128MB differ in the memory buses (the former has 128bit, the latter - 256bit), because both are built on RADEON 9700's PCB which supports a 256bit bus on the hardware level, and the 64MB model is obtained by removing half of the memory chips (the memory bus is therefore shorter as well). That is why RADEON 9500 128MB was much more popular as it had better performance and could be turned into RADEON 9700.

Just got word that VR-Zone Hardware has just posted a review of the ATI All in Wonder Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card. Here's a snip.

The results from the overclocked 3D Mark 2001 SE tests show an average score increase of 800-900 3DMarks through the various resolutions ran.

Last month NVIDIA announced the rest of the DirextX9 capable, GeForce FX range. In addition to GeForce FX 5800 (NV30) NVIDIA are adding 5600 (NV31) and 5200 (NV34) to the new GeForce FX line. Today Beyond3D takes a reference NV31 based GeForce FX 5600 Ultra for a spin to see what its made of! Here's a snip.

In comparison to the Ti4200, NV31's single texturing fill-rate is just a little higher which is as we'd expect, albeit possibly to a greater degree.

More retail Geforce FX reviews are starting to come in. TBreak has had the opportunity to check whether custom cooling solutions indeed provide an advantage over Flow FX. Leadtek is using a complete casing to snuggle the card into. It also looks like Nvidia is preventing overclocking FX's via BIOS. Although the Leadtek card doesn't officially occupy the next PCI slot, it does come close enough to pretty much leave the first PCI slot unusable. The sound produced by the Leadtek is definitely lower than the MSI solution and cooling works much better as well. One fan takes the air in while the other blows it out. The average temperatures as measured by Nvidia drivers were close to 60 degress on the MSI whereas the Leadtek runs almost ten degress cooler - around 50-53 range. We couldn't overclock this card either and Leadtek informed us that Nvidia has currently locked the overclocking feature from the BIOS in FX cards, however, in the future, Leadtek might provide a way to unlock and overclock. Since this card runs cooler than the MSI card, we're pretty certain that it should overclock well.

OCIA takes a look at the X-Sonic Aluminum Midtower Case in their latest review. Here's a snip.

Here we get an internal look at the drive bays. This case supports four 5 1/4" drives, two 3 1/2" external drives and two 3 1/2" internal drives. Below the 3 1/2" bays we have a neon green fan holder. An 80mm case fan can be installed here to draw cool air from outside and blow it across your PCI cards. Speaking of the 3 1/2" bays, the entire rack is removable for easy HDD installation.

Viper Lair : have updated their Epox 8RDA+ review with some new overclocking and memory benchmarks as a result of switching to Corsair TWINX PC3200 ram.

"We've replaced the Crucial PC2700 with Corsair TWINX PC3200, and redid the overclocking. As a result, we were able to improve our sycronous overclocking results to 12.5x190, which may not seem like much, but the memory timings are 5-2-2-2, which should result in much better overall system performance. By moving to a CAS latency of 2.5, our syncronous overclocked result was 12.5x192."

Techseekers.net has reviewed the KiSS DVD player DP-450 with MPEG4(DivX) playback. After playing around with the Kiss DP-450 DVD/DivX player I got around to writing a review on it. It does provide excellent DivX, XviD and RealMagic MPEG4 playback, but its not without its little problems.

All in all, I was impressed with the DP-450. DivX and XviD playback was outstanding, with some high quality files,you would be hard pressed to tell the difference between that and a DVD. Some DivX files can take up two CDs, and if they are SVCD it can be 3 CDs. With a DVD-R burner you can put both DivX files onto one disk enhancing the playback experience. The same applies to the 3CD SVCD. Just take the 3 MPEG2 files and put them on one DVD-R.It is such a timesaver to put the movies onto a CD-R rather than convert it to 2CD VCD to watch it in the living room. Excellent stuff.

Just got word that VR-Zone has done up a review on the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra card with the latest Detonator 43.45 drivers! Here's snip.

Interestingly, we found that the 3DMark2003 performance improved with even more the new 43.45 drivers over the "performance" 42.68 drivers. The card itself is made of high quality 12 layers PCB and until now, NVIDIA has sticked to making the whole card themselves due to the stringent PCB requirements. There is no question that GeForce FX 5800 Ultra is the highest performing card now but availability of the card is still a question as we don't see any retail cards out there selling yet. GeForce FX 5800 Ultra overclocks quite decently with core/mem at 570/1140Mhz but the heat is still limiting better overclocking.

In a market that is swamped with cold cathodes, can Flexiglow make themselves stand out? And is it enough for you to buy their product? You'll need to read to find out.

Rainer send me some words that he has published a review about the ST-11 Low Noise Case.

The ST-11 low noise case has already won a contest between 7 other manufacturers in one of Germany's biggest magazines, the c´t.
The article is written in german, an english translation comes soon.
Review in german
Review in english via Google

TheCrucible.ca has posted a review of 7 nForce2 motherboards. Head to head comparisons of synthetic and real world performance as well as overclocking. Interested to see who makes the fastest board? Check it out.

Summing up this product is practically a no-brainer. Great features, great VHS/DVD playback, great options and Samsung's attention to detail and perfection makes this one of the "must-have" products of 2003. It pretty well handles every type of media you can throw at it and only takes up one measly space in your entertainment centre.

Digit-Life takes a different approach this time on the review. We all know the FX is fast and that it's loud. But how does it stack up against ATI's now 'mainstream' Radeon 9700 Pro in terms of quality? Well that is a different story and here is a snip of the answer: All these attributes of a super-accelerator do not help it outsmart RADEON 9700 PRO, except a few cases of victory, but at the maximum AA and anisotropy levels this card loses the battle. [...] All these facts and NVIDIA's striving for NV35 made NV30 an outcast with the manufacturers. Few companies are going to roll out cards based on NV30, but it will be done mostly for the sake of press-releases. Such cards won't be in large supply. Wise words by Andrew Worobyew. Couldn't have said it better myself.

Datafuse writes I could probably call this review: Mod-It Antec-Style.

It seems like ages ago since I looked at some accessories, but companies still manage to produce new and improved stuff. I'm going to take a quick look at what seems to be very nice rounded IDE-cables. And instead of inside case lighting such as CCFL's, I will be looking at some external lighting.

PCStats has reviewed Albatron's special i845PE based motherboard PX845PEV-800. The speciality of it lies in the fact that Albatron claims the board will run up to 200 MHz FSB and support PC3200 DDR memory. This would enable it to utilize the upcoming Prescott and Tejas processors from which at least Prescott will launch later this year. You got to keep in mind though that Prescott 800Mhz support will remain unofficial with the 845PE chipset. Here is an excerpt: At 145 MHz FSB we hit a snag and had to raise the CPU Voltage to 1.65V to help stabilize things. As suspected we maxed out at 150 MHz FSB, anything higher and we wouldn't be able to load Windows. For the sake of testing we also loaded up the P4 1.6A, that chip was able to hit 175 MHz FSB with a CPU voltage of 1.75V before becoming unstable. I'm positive that if I had a P4 capable of 200 MHz FSB I could run it on the PX845PEV-800 without any problems.