Month: June 2008

Noctua NH-U12P tower Cooler

Noctua’s original big tower heatsink underwent some tweaks and mods, enough to earn it an additional letter in its model designation. The newer high pressure NF-P12 fan is one of the changes; others are more subtle, like improved soldering, slightly different dimensions and others Noctua has not detailed. Did they make it a better product?

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Zerotherm Zen FZ120 CPU Cooler

The Zerotherm Zen FZ120 is a conventional, high performance, tower heatsink for CPUs — it has four U-shaped heatpipes, tightly packed fins, and a 120mm PWM fan attached via wire clips. It sports a few curves and contours reminiscent of the BTF80/BTF90 “butterfly” coolers (which were quite good)… but the sheer size of the new

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Asus EN3650 Silent Graphics Card

Asus is extending the use of its passive V-Cool heatsink down to a video card with a price tag that appeals to the masses, based around an ATI Radeon 3650 GPU. We know it won’t be as fast as the 3800 series, but will it do high def video, idle at lower power, and stay

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WD SE16 Caviar 640GB is now Blue

Western Digital has a new color code to identify different classes of drives in its lineup. This 320GB/platter, 2-platter 640GB is now in team Blue, between Black and Green. The single-platter 320GB model had casing variants which made it either very quiet or not so quiet. What about the Caviar Blue 640?

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Noctua NH-C12P: A Top-Down Cooler Rises Up

The first top-down CPU cooler from Noctua is a refined, unusual product that exudes thoughtfulness all around and comes with an equally unusual fan. But does it deliver silent cooling?

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WD VelociRaptor: A Triple Crown

It’s an unusual product in every way: A 10,000rpm SATA drive in an enterprise 2.5″ form factor mated to a cast aluminum heatsink with a 3.5″ desktop HDD form factor. WD’s Velociraptor actually manages to win three crowns at SPCR: Performance, Green and Acoustics… but for the last crown, not the way it’s delivered to

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Samsung F1 750GB & 1TB Drives: Fast… and Silent?

Samsung F1s are the top performing 7200RPM desktop drives of the day. We put the 750G and 1TB models through their paces in SPCR’s acoustics chamber to find out whether they can take the low noise crown.

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Thermalright HR-01 Plus: 2nd Gen Killer Tower Cooler

The HR-01 Plus is an improved version of an earlier passive model. It now sports fan clips, and six heatpipes instead of four. With wide fin spacing for minimal airflow resistance, can this tower heatsink challenge the silent leaders?

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Computex 2008: Antec’s Skeleton, P183 & Sonata Elite cases

No one from SPCR is in Taipei for Computex, but that doesn’t stop us from bringing you exclusive photos, information and a video of Antec’s aptly named Skeleton chassis. We’ve also got photos and info about the upcoming P183 and Sonata Elite cases.

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Computex 2008: Asus Eee Box & PC, and Xonar HDAV1.3 a/v combo card

New products from Asus include the Eee Box, bigger and better versions of the Eee PC laptop, and the Xonar HDAV1.3, a unique new A/V combo card.

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