Month: February 2009

Prolima Megahalems: A Mega Nehalem Cooler

Prolimatech is a relatively new Taiwanese company with only one product: the Megahalems CPU cooler. Despite Prolima’s relative obscurity, the Megahalems has been making the rounds at several well-known PC enthusiasts sites and getting excellent marks. There’s only one thing left standing between the Megahalems and greatness: a thumbs up from SPCR.

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Seagate Pipeline HD Pro 1TB Hard Drive

Seagate’s Pipeline series of hard drives are aimed at DVRs, HTPCs and other devices designed to serve up media. Since performance is not critical for these types of applications, we assume that such a drive would be power efficient and quiet, two qualities that are right up our alley.

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Xonar HDAV1.3 Deluxe: Asus HTPC sound card does Everything

Xonar’s top-of-the-line sound card tries to do everything, including a few things that, strictly speaking, it shouldn’t have to. It’s the first audio card to support HDCP and PAP, which means it can stream high resolution audio formats like Dolby Digital TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio without downsampling. It also boasts high quality analogue circuitry,

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VIA Artigo: A Pico-ITX System

The VIA Artigo Pico-ITX Builder Kit is a tiny barebones PC that fits in the palm of your hand. Powered by VIA’s C7 1.0GHz processor and the VX700 chipset with S3 Unichrome Pro II integrated graphics, it won’t be winning any performance contests, but it should at least be power efficient and quiet.

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PowerColor SCS HD4650: A Fanless Budget Graphics Card

The Radeon HD 4650 is a slightly cut-down version of the HD 4670, but still retains much of the performance of its bigger brother. The SCS is PowerColor’s fanless version of the HD 4650, featuring a simple heatpipe cooler reminiscent of the Arctic Cooling Accelero series. Does it perform well, or is it simply adequate?

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Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB: The Perfect Balance?

On the outside, Seagate’s 7200.11 1.5TB drive looks no different than the 1TB model. On the inside however, the platters are much more massive: 375GB vs. 250GB. Performance should be improved but will that be accompanied by extra noise?

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