Month: September 2009

Scythe Musashi Dual Fan GPU Cooler [Postcript Added]

The Musashi is a long, slim, dual fan GPU cooler from Scythe. We installed it on an ATI HD4870, and put it through a grueling torture test against our old favorite, the Arctic Cooling Accelero S1. POSTCRIPT added Nov 29, 2009. See page 8 for details.

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Athlon II X4 630 & 620: Affordable Quad Cores

The newly released Athlon II X4 630 and 620 finally bring quad core performance to the $100 level. With respective prices of $120 and $100, the high value X4 630 and X4 630 continue AMD’s sniping of Intel.

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Smallish LGA775 Heatsink Roundup – Part 2

In our continuing quest for compact, effective and silent CPU coolers, we ran a gladiatorial roundup with competitors from Silverstone, Nexus and Cooler Master seeking to wrest the top spot from the Scythe Big Shuriken.

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Lenovo’s All-in-one: IdeaCentre A600

Integrated all-in-one PCs are becoming more visible, with morphing nettops, Apple iMacs, and now, Lenovo IdeaCentres. The A600 series is Lenovo’s first entry into the home desktop PC market, and it has many of the features that endear iMacs to their users.

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Gateway EC1803h: Netbook or Ultra-portable?

The Gateway EC1803h has an 11.6″ 1366×768 display, a CULV Core 2 Solo 1.4GHz processor, GMA 4500MHD graphics, is only 1″ thick and weighs about 3.2lb. Is it a netbook, an ultra-portable, or something in-between? We explore the first of what appears to be a new class of notebooks.

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Intel’s LGA1156 and Lynnfield core

To be a fitting successor to LGA775, Intel’s new LGA1156 will have to offer a fair increase in performance and energy efficiency, but not so much to overshadow LGA1366. Lynnfield takes mostly after Nehalem, but requires only a single chipset (the new Platform Controller Hub), has a dual channel memory controller rather than triple, and

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Asus Eee PC Seashell 1005HA netbook

The market is littered with 10″ netbook peas in a pod, not least the dozens of variants by Asus. The 1005HA seems to be special in a few different ways, mainly overall balance and fantastic untethered run time. Our first look since the very first netbooks.

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