Better adaptive anti-aliasing, better video playback, better performance, and priced in reach for anyone who wants one--seriously, for less than four hundred dollars, given how cheap everything els...

As much as I’m fond of feature-rich devices, dense with macros and custom binds, and as much as I love a sexy peripheral, Razer keeps me loyal with one simple feat: their mice--as this is my ...

I initially mistook the Lplayer for its older cousin, the Clix. I had always been infatuated with the physical design of the original D*Click player, and iRiver has brought yet another product to ...

Corsair's got a cute rubber flash drive on their hands, I gotta say. Black with red and yellow highlights, the GT looks fairly swift. It's ruggedized and water-resistant, without frills...

Not every flash drive can be fast, or can be pretty, or can be sturdy, big, small, capacious, easy to find, and discreet. No, some are just a little ugly. PNY’s Attache bears little of the ...

I was a little noncommittal in recommending the 4670 and I suspect that I’m pretty much in the same boat with regards to the 4650. On the one hand, these are inexpensive cards with impressiv...

Though the flash drive doesn’t have the classic OCZ cheesegrater heatspreaders, it is completely clad in what looks to me to be lightly-powdercoated aluminum. Which makes it one of the tough...

Sometimes a video card needs to be just that. A card for video. Many high-end workstation motherboards don’t have integrated video, but what good is a computer without a display? The Intel ...

Did you ever want to use a flash drive as a weapon? Like, reach into your pocket as two shifty characters come towards you, and clutching it like a roll of quarters, use it to line up all your knu...

The Cooler Master Storm has to be the coolest case I’ve played with in months. There’s something about it that can only really be classified as cool. It’s all black, it’s ...

Alright. Time for a refresh, it's almost spring, and that's the season for growing video cards. The HD 4890 is, for all intensive porpoises, a retooled HD 4870, which, in my humble opin...

One thought springs to mind. Is this case too budget? It's for sale well under a hundred bucks, which might mean that there are too many cut corners, or maybe that instead of some kind of NA...

In the midst of all the rebranding and fine-tuning, NVIDIA managed to make again, the most powerful single-GPU video card. Well, they also made the most powerful dual-GPU video card but that’...

The GTX 295 is, like ATI's HD 4870 X2, two cards in one. It has two GPUs, connected by an onboard PCI-Express bridge, in SLI fashion. The GPUs are modified GTX 260s, architecturally identica...

The Ninja had everything going for it: silence, performance, a low price, and, er, size. It's monolithic design was a concern, in that people really did need to be concerned that it might not...

Normally, adding more video memory is a mistake. It's a ploy by the manufacturer to make their card look special, it's a way to make a card sound more capable than it is, and it's a...

I don't think there's a "stock" 4830. Sapphire usually runs that route with the non-Toxic or their other variants, but I'm pretty sure that it's up to the board partner to buil...

Only after being bested by it could I ever hope to wield it's… Oh screw it, it's just a video card. I mean, it's the best video card and all, and definitely not for everybody....

If all you could see was the mouse, you might just buy it there. There's a lot of action on the thing, but a little studying shows not bling, but function cut down to hard lines. And then th...

You want a big, breezy, E-ATX case. You've gone over your floor plans, moved the furniture around, checked the availability of outlets, and made sure the space next to your desk can withstand...

On paper and in tests, the 9500 GT is half a 9600 GT--there's a lot missing in that last 100. It's got half the shaders (32) half the ROPs (8) and half the bandwidth (128-bit). Adding i...

The construction is top-notch, it's not too heavy, and it's loaded with features. I like that it's symmetrical without sacrificing comfort. There's a lot of quality design inv...

So, you've lined up your ducks, asked only for Newegg gift certificates, Fallout 3, and set aside a week of sick leave. It's time to buy that new video card. I took ten mainstream and hi...

Having already taken a crowbar to prices like a spree-killing Yellow Man, the 4870's refresh seems overdue. The card, stonkin' as it is, has an annoying stock heatsink and a lot of untap...

One of the greatest things about fabrication processes is that they can be shrunk. Assuming that your architecture is forward-thinking enough, and it navigates issues with power plane-mapping and ...

Now, personally, I don't go in for the metal sinew-and-eyeballs theme, but I tip my hat to the Giger-inspired paint-monkey that delivered it with so much polish, and the fact is that you can a...

I think it's worth everyone's wait for Toxic. As far as brandings go, anyway. But Sapphire puts so much effort into general improvements over the stock designs--which they have no small...

I have always had problems endorsing the sub-hundred dollar video card. Usually, for an amount less than the video game you intend to play, you can get a card that can actually play said game, unl...

This is not really an exotic case. It's reverse-ATX, with the expansion slots above the processor and the door on the wrong side. It just doesn't have a lot of free space--an elegant pr...

Any keyboard will type, but the Das Keyboard Professional (and Ultimate) take the decades-proven IBM standard and make it perfect. Each key is crafted, every keystroke is perfect. The sound comin...

It's not just unfortunate laptops that are bereft of Bluetooth connectivity; how many desktops have you used recently without it? And for most people, most of the time, this is a complete non...

I don't hate the player, and I'm certainly not disappointed with it. I just have a hard time recommending it, unless you know you're willing to spend time with a machine and learn h...

It's clear that the shortcomings are all Netflix-based, the greatest of all being selection. They don't have a lot of recent content, and they have a lot of content rated three stars and...

Turtle Beach's X4 wireless gaming headset is a great way to tap the enormous console market. Wireless headset? Playing video games in the living room at night without bothering anyone? Sign...

It shouldn't take too long to guess that this is the same card as an 8800 GS, right? I mean, same clock speeds, same memory bus, same wonky 384MB of RAM. Yep, it's just a re-badged GS. ...

It's an unfortunate thing that the 9800 GTX doesn't quite live up to a souped-up, though no longer available, 8800 GTX. I mean, it's definitely a better card in most respects. It c...

This is the ATI counter-point to the 9800 GTX+: Sapphire's Toxic HD 4850. It may be alone, and it may not be more power-friendly, but it's, ahem, wickedly fast. The icing is that it doe...

The GTX 260 is exceptionally powerful, quiet, even power-miserly. It too has dropped in price--you can find them for around $200 (!) with a rebate, anyway--although EVGA's FTW is... more. Ho...

Acer isn't Samsung, but its small, sub-$200 X193W+BD should get a serious once-over by the gaming portion of the market. The size difference means fast-switching .243mm pitch pixels (in this ...

So, are they truly studio-quality? Eh, if you had a studio you wouldn't put up with the sweepingly uneven amplification. You can compensate for it, and get some very impressive sound from th...

I'm reserving any real conclusions for the 4870 X2 until I can benchmark it with retail drivers. There were just too many weird results here to make any concrete proclamations. I will say th...

It would be very, very hard not to covet this video card. I know I recently said that the 9800 GTX was the sexy card, but this one might actually look nicer, eye of the beholder and all. And it&#...

In Win is a king of case manufacturers. Their purview extends across the entire realm of beige, from the calm sea of beige to the shallow cliffs of beige, with the inoffensive beige plains between....

I'm of two minds on this wireless SD card. It's clever, unique, relatively inexpensive, and essentially universal. It's pretty, in a memory card sort of way. It has a couple of fl...

The real win is having a $300 card: NVIDIA made a lot of money with the 9800 GTX before the 4850 forced them to sell it for $200. Now that bracket belongs to ATI, who, for the first time in years,...

Picking out a video card should be a little more exciting than finding the cheapest one on the, er, "shelf" and going about your build. Unfortunately for now, the available 4870s are all stock. P...

Some of the glimmer has blown away; this is the fastest single-GPU card of all time, but HD 4000 is a whirlwind. It's all value, though, and the best has and will always require a price premi...

Interestingly, there seem to be few, if any drastic, architecture changes for HD 4000. It's all scale down, add more. PowerColor, a long-time board partner, shows just how well this strategy...

The 4870 is an excellent card, but for now, all the models are functionally identical, and there are yet to be factory-overclocked cards, let alone custom-cooled models. Variation ranges from chan...

Mmm, Mac hardware. Sharp. Purposeful. Tasty. Downright industrial designelicious. Half of the people who make the vaunted switch do so because of this keyboard. I mean, not literally this keyboard,...

I've had this KPC for a month now. Maybe longer, actually. This review has seen setback after setback: I've had entirely too grand a time playing with this little Linux wonder to really...

Everyone recommends the GeForce 9600 GT first, and they should. It's got a price-to-performance ratio unlike any card before. I'm not exaggerating. This card could very well be the best...

Welcomed by all, purchased by few: everyone wants a Western Digital VelociRaptor, but the people who have three hundred bucks to spend on three hundred gigs are... rare. Without a doubt, Western...

ATI's HD 3650 replaces the HD 2600 Pro, a frustrating underachiever. Generally, I dislike video cards in the $50-100 range, mainly because they're not going to play new games well and, i...

Razer's entrance into the gaming sound arena was impressive and simple, following the path they’d cut for input devices. Their audio lineup includes a superb sound card, a headset, and ...

Under the heatsink is a whole lot of GDDR3, which in itself doesn't mean much--you can find a pile of budget cards with a gig of RAM, the extra memory incapable of boosting their meager perfor...

So why not just get two 3870s and rub a little CrossFire into your box? There are two reasons, really. For most people, that's just not an option. Dual-PCI-Express can easily tag a Benjamin...

The Centurion line of Cooler Master cases has always been a solid entry-level series, targeted at gamers who don't want bling. Even modders like the steel. For enthusiasts, there's the ...

When I reviewed their luscious A5s, my own music, music that I leave playing all the time, music that I can play in my head sans stereo, I... it mesmerized me. There was so much I didn't know...

We know it'd make more sense to just spend more money on a really fast card, but--two video cards! Given that you can definitely get two 3850s for $300, it seems like a reasonable upgrade opt...

With it's release during the massive hardware holliday last year, the HD 3850, the least of four major cards, is easily overlooked. That's really a shame, since it's really a top-no...

I was a bit surprised that Asus asked us to review their flagship budget--it's weird just writing that--8600 GT TOP. It's new SKU for a card closing in on its end of life; the model bein...

Audioengine's stellar A5 "bookshelf" speakers knocked me flat with perfect sound. The fact that this company would trust invisible air tubes over good ol' copper to not screw up their per...

Gigabyte is a solid company. They're at the top of my list, it would seem, so picking a current-generation entry-level motherboard without integrated graphics narrows things down to about hal...

It's hard to believe, but there are actually many people who don't want the trappings, and cost, of gaming hardware. Integrated graphics aren't always an option and, when they are, ...

While they’re mostly known for their portable hard drives and USB flash drives, US Modular has been making system memory in California long enough to know how to bin the good stuff and slap s...

SilverStone must be a cool place for an engineer. Not only do they obviously put engineering first, but they don't simply accommodate innovative designs; they make them their staple. Without...

You wouldn't know by looking, but Intel's a little new at the chipset business. It's not that they haven't been doing it for decades, but just that they've never made a bu...

People recognize Aliph Jawbones in the same way that they easily spot iPhones. These Aliph headsets are loved by those who use them, while everyone else in close proximity of the secret conversati...

On the floor, with my head between the speakers, I listened to my library for hours. I heard things I’d never heard before: spittle hitting the mic, catching on its wires; each of the condu...

ATI's HD 2600 XT is a pretty nice card. It plays games acceptably well, consumes a negligible amount of power, and has flawless video acceleration. It's my first choice for the mainstre...

I've said before that the HD 2600 Pro should be passed over in favor of the XT for anyone who wants to play video games, or the HD 2400 XT for people just interested in having a discrete graph...

AMD's 690 chipset doesn't stop turning heads. The way it was introduced, as a low-priced alternative to Intel, with budget trim and no enthusiast options, belittled its raucous performan...

The K9AGM2-FIH is still a decent-performing, good-looking motherboard, but, in the end, it breaks no ground and makes mistakes that cause its mundanity. It serves as an example for what not to do ...

Although not the first of its kind, with overlapping, curved lines and a reflective metal-flake finish, it absolutely makes a show of combined elegance and stature. The black is accentuated by chr...

Mushkin has been on the enthusiast scene for over a decade, and consistently produces memory at better timings and higher clockspeeds than the majority of competing memory manufacturers. Their dev...

People who have used Razer products rarely have ambiguous opinions about them. Nobody ever picked up a Diamondback in 2004 and said, "As far as input devices go, it has buttons, and wiggles a curs...

OCZ plays the high-end game almost exclusively, and has innovation and performance marks to back up the company’s rep. Given all that, their Platinum series is about as vanilla as they scoop...

As a keyboard snob, I have to preface this with a forewarning: I hate ergonomic keyboards. I find that they tweak my tendons (or don't tweak them enough) and muss with my muscle memory. They...

Good RAM wouldn't be good if it didn't have rows of flashing lights under its heatspreader. Wait, that makes no sense. RAM is good when it, and, therefore, your computer, blazes. It sh...

We're getting into the hardware reviews something fierce, and now is a good time to start a series of memory articles. Let's begin with the basics: DDR2-800. Also known as PC2 6400 RAM, ...

I've said it before: the 8800-series cards are great. They are heavy-hitters in the gaming world. They are well-built and very quiet. And, even though they've been available for some t...

When I think laptop, I think portable computing. I want to be able to check some mail, sync some music, and basically, go a long time out of the house without worrying about where I'm going t...

ATI is changing pace from their flagship by releasing their DirectX 10 mainstream cards within recent memory of NVIDIA's mainstream release. NVIDIA's mainstream release was memorable if bitter; th...

When I played with Asus' 8800GTX, I was disappointed. It wasn't special.It was a stock-clocked GTX, with a stock trimmings, a simple bundle, at a price well above the competition. It didn't even ...

The 8800GTX, after many months on the market, is still the best of the best. Sure, there's one card for competition: the 8800 Ultra; but that's sort of a joke; it's basically a stock-overclocked G...

Hardware like video cards, especially high-end video cards, often fall under the purview of the Enthusiast. An enthusiast is a computing hobbyist with a kind of hardware pioneer's mindset. Never ...

Today we have for review an Albatron 8600 GT from Albatron. This is a standard (as opposed to overclocked) version of NVIDIA's 8600 GT. The 8600 GT performance is a little under par with the 7900 G...

It has been six months and one week since NVIDIA launched their highly acclaimed 8-series of DirectX 10 video cards. ATI is more than a little late, but then again, why rush? Yes, many people hav...

With prices for speakers as low as they are, and with all the competition and variety, it's difficult to pick a good set of speakers... Especially if you aren't an audiophile. No matter what price ...

Logitech wowed us in person at CES with what had to be the prettiest keyboard ever made. Now we've got one on-hand to get down and dirty with. The question is, is it all sex and no love? And...

This HTPC case transforms from mid-tower to desktop, can be modified with a full MCE-compatible media kit, and joins with the other CM cases to form: Sentinel Master Omegus! Not suitable for child...

Today we'll be looking at the Silverstone TJ09 Full-Tower Case. It sports a handful of innovations such as a separate hard drive section and unique video card cooling. The accolades for the TJ09 ar...

Since the release of NVIDIA's 8800-series, NVIDIA has proven that they are kings of quantity -and- quality. Gone are the days of speckled texture processing, along with spiking and dropping framer...

AMD has officially announced their first in-house chipset, RS690. In the form of 690V, we take an ASUS board for a spin against the long-standing nVidia competition: MCP61. Can the new chipset ho...

The demand for 2.1 speakers such as Altec Lansing's FX4021 is quite high. Available for as little as $100 this speaker set is very appealing to anyone who wants sound to kick a little harder than ...

Antec has built their reputation and great following by making conservative cases with outstanding build quality and a mind for acoustics. Even their portable, LAN-centric designs are utile and re...

There's something about Thermaltake's Mozart TX that is uncommon in cases; something beyond its aluminum construction, minimalist styling and size. It's potential. With all its compartmentalizati...

AM2 has revitalized AMD's K8 architecture. Core 2 has spurred the competition fiercely. Socket 939 has lost its leg up. Or has it? From the early nForce3 and K8T800 chipsets to the awesome nForce 4...