Month: July 2006

Zalman CNPS8000: A Worthy Successor?

Zalman has broken with tradition and released a low profile heatsink that is not based on their’s classic “flower” clamped-fins design. It’s the same height as the venerable CNPS7000, but it has heatpipes and it weighs 100 grams less. How does it perform?

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Antec NSK3300: Quiet Out-of-the-Box

Antec brings the sophistication of separate cooling zones from their big P180 to a small, inexpensive microATX case. The NSK3300 is bundled with a 300W SFX power supply, and is promoted as “small, quiet and highly efficient”. SPCR takes a close look to see if the new case is really all those things.

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Arctic Cooling Alpine HSF: A New Budget King?

Processors are getting cooler, and giant tower behemoths are not needed to cool 35W processors. While the overclocking market will always ensure a place for heatsink/fans that can deal with >100W of CPU heat, most of us don’t need that kind of cooling any more. The Arctic Cooling Alpine 7 & 64 are reminiscent of

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Scythe “Summit” Mine Heatsink/Fan

Scythe has been the most prolific heatsink manufacturer recently, and we think we know why: They’re cross-breeding their existing heatsinks to produce new ones. The Mine is the offsping of a Ninja and a Kamakiri, with genes from the Samurai Z mixed in. This heatsink has high aims; it has the Ninja in its sights,

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nMedia Icetank: More than a Cute Name?

We like it when companies have a sense of humor about their products. That’s a good thing for nMedia, since their Icetank heatsink is named almost as ridiculously as Scythe’s Fishcake (Kamaboko). The joke extends farther than just the name too; the heatsink bears an unmistakable resemblance to a tanker truck. Is the heatsink as

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Lian Li PC-101: Aluminum *Can* be Quiet!

Lian Li projects a certain image: Classy, sexy, and very expensive. Quiet doesn’t come to mind, but Lian Li seems to be trying: The PC-101 is billed as a “Classical Silent” case. What does that mean? We’re always skeptical that an aluminum case can be made quiet… but this time, we are pleasantly surprised.

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Audio Recording Methods Revised

We listen to our visitors and forum members. We really do. We can’t always give you what you want (we get enough requests to triple our workload), but sometimes it takes an outside view to show us how we can improve. And improve we have. We’re unveiling a new methodology for making audio recordings and

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Western Digital Scorpio: Another Quiet Notebook Drive

Western Digital has done little to promote their line of notebook drives, and with the flagship drive coming in at just 120 GB, it’s not hard to see why. Rated according to the usual slew of benchmarks and performance tests, this Scorpio is not particularly noteworthy. But, SPCR doesn’t run the usual slew of benchmarks

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