Month: November 2005

Seasonic SS-300SFD 80 Plus: Little Big PSU

After all the gleaming silver, blue-glowing, features-bursting power supplies that dance across the SPCR test bench, it can be a relief to come across a product utterly devoid of excess. The Seasonic SS-300SFD – 80 Plus version is such product: An SFX12V PSU able to deliver anywhere from 40W to a full 300W at >80%

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Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro HSF

Our favorite low cost quiet heatsink/fan maker has a new flagship with some unusual and innovative heatures. Multiple copper heatpipes and thin fins, of course, as in the original Freezer, and an improved “frameless” fan mounted with miniature soft rubber grommets. It’s quite the cooling performer. What about noise? Read on to find out about

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Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 500GB HDD

Seagate joins Maxtor and Hitachi in offering a 500 GB hard drive in this era of ever increasing storage capacity. The Barracuda 7200.9 is a 4-platter drive with 16 mb of cache and SATA 2.5 compliance. We take a sample for a spin around our lab.

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Modding the Zalman 9500 Heatsink

Seagate joins Maxtor and Hitachi in offering a 500 GB hard drive in this era of ever increasing storage capacity. The Barracuda 7200.9 is a 4-platter drive with 16 mb of cache and SATA 2.5 compliance. We take a sample for a spin around our lab….

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Asetek Vapochill Micro CPU heatsink/fan

The Asetek name has long been associated with extreme PC cooling, including refrigeration and water cooling. The’re stepping more into the mainstream with an unusual heatpipe-heatsink/fan product that borrows from previous technologies. We gave the Vapochill Micro a thorough workout on the testbench for cooling and acoustic performance.

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Enermax Laureate EB205U external notebook HDD enclosure

The Enermax Laureate EB205U external notebook HDD enclosure is a little aluminum enclosure only marginally bigger than a notebook drive. USB 2.0 provides both connectivity and power for the drive. How well does this $22 MSRP device work?

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FSP Green PS FSP400-60GLN 400W PSU

It’s a generic-looking power supply, both outside and in, and it conforms to new EU regulations aginst the use of toxic and unrecyclable materials in electronic products. They also claim that it’s very efficient despite its modest appearance. Is it good? Is it stable? Is it quiet? We run a sample of the Fortron-Source Power

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Enermax Liberty EL500AWT & EL620AWT power supplies

A venerable power supply brand expands its range to 120mm fan with detachable cable models. The Liberty line aims for high efficiency and low noise as well, and offers up a big serving of functional luxury. Their marketing team is bent on Big Ideas this time around: Eternity cables in the Liberty power supplies. We

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Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100GB SATA notebook drive

Our usual noise-focused review of a new Momentus 2.5″ HDD model from Seagate. This one is 7200 RPM, with 8 MB cache, SATA & NCQ and still very quiet. Pretty pricey at this point, but that’s the norm for any fast cutting-edge component.

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